Roots: The Saga of an American Family Characters

King KuntaKendrick Lamar sums up Kunta Kinte best (because of course he does; he's the brilliant Kendrick Lamar):King Kunta/ Everybody wanna cut the legs off him, Kunta/ Black man taking no losses...

If Kunta Kinte is the star quarterback, Chicken George is the class clown. If Kunta Kinte is Zeus, Chicken George is Hermes. Kunta's stoic like Superman…while Chicken George is more on a par with...

In many ways, Tom is the most fitting heir to the Kinte legacy…because he combines basically all of the Kinte patriarchs' best qualities. He's stoic and no-nonsense like Kunta. He's brilliantly i...

When Mick Jagger sang, "You can't always get what you want/ but if you try sometimes/ you just might find/ you get what you need " we're pretty sure he was talking about the romance between Bell an...

Move aside, Marmee. Move aside, Annie John Sr. There's a new matriarch in town.Kizzy seems to have the toughest road in all of Roots. She endures a lot of pain and wins few personal victories, and...

Kunta learns a lot from his stern father Omoro, and those lessons prove invaluable to him as he endures the most trying experiences of his life—getting kidnapped by slavers, having his foot chopp...

Binta and Kunta butt heads sometimes, as mothers and sons often do, but the love between them should be an inspiration—-not to mention a helpful reminder to call our moms a bit more often.From th...

Lamin, Suwadu, and Madi are Kunta's three brothers. Kunta acts as a mentor figure to Lamin when he's young, teaching him about the world and even taking him on gold-hunt. Lamin ends up doing someth...

Nyo Boto's an old midwife from Juffure. And she's also Kunta's favorite person in the universe when he's a little whippersnapper. (Aww.) In addition, she also shows us what makes the American insti...

Grandmother Yaisa's Kunta Kinte's grandmother—and we wish she were our grammy. She teaches him many valuable lessons (most notably the crocodile allegory we discuss in the symbolism section). Als...

Massa Waller's a nicer guy than his brother (Kunta's first owner) but that doesn't mean much in the grand scheme of things. It's like saying that a hammerhead shark is less dangerous than a great w...

The fiddler's Kunta's first real friend in America. Although this outgoing, life-of-the-party musician doesn't have much in common with the uber-serious Kunta, they provide each other a great deal...

Massa Tom Lea's a difficult character to pin down. It's not that he exists in a moral gray area a la Walter White—he's definitely a bad dude. But in Roots we get a glimpse at the human-ness at th...

Uncle Mingo does a lot more for Chicken George than just teach him how to gamecock—he becomes the kid's legit father figure. For the most part, Uncle Mingo remains entirely separate from the othe...

Miss Malizy, Sister Sarah, and Uncle Pompey are the only people working on Tom Lea's farm when Kizzy is first sold there. Although the group comes together to form a makeshift family, they become s...

Although Matilda marries into the Kinte family, she becomes as important to its foundation as anyone. After all, with a hubby like Chicken George, someone's got to take things seriously around here...

Irene is Tom's wife: the daughter of a runaway slave mother and Native American father. She's yet another in a long line of smart, focused, and spiritual woman who marries into the Kinte clan and h...

Massa and Missis Murray are the family's final owners. They're city folk who only own their plantation because of an inheritance, which makes them the most sympathetic slave-owners in the novel. Of...

Ol' George is pretty much the only white guy who befriends the family. And how does he do it? It's pretty simple, actually. Listen to Lilly Sue tell it:"He talk like any other cracker. What make hi...

Not to be confused with Laura Palmer. *Shudder. (All you Twin Peaks fans know what we're talking about.)Cynthia is Tom and Irene's youngest daughter…and she marries Will Palmer, a hard-working yo...

Simon and Bertha Haley are the parents of Alex, our narrator. Bertha lives a pretty cushy existence, to be honest. Her father's a successful businessman, which means that she can get anything she w...

Cousin Georgia is the only member of the older generation still alive when Alex Haley gets to work on Roots. She becomes incredibly excited when she hears that Alex's uncovering the truth behind th...

In a Shyamalan -worthy twist, Roots reveals in its final chapters that the narrator has been Alex Haley, the great-great-great-great-grandson of Kunta Kinte, the whole time.Whoa. That's a big "gotc...