"Kneeling at the Fireplace: Black Vulcan-ROOTS and the Double Artificer"

Abstract

Most reviewers of Roots have overlooked Alex Haley's allusions to Vulcan. L. D. Reddick,2 a Temple University historian, observes instead that the book is a literary masterpiece, although the literary critic Larry King3 believes the book is more skillfully conceived than well-written. Still Haley does recreate the type of the Greek god and the Roman Vulcan who is the patron of the arts and crafts.4 Re-placing the type in African and Afro-American culture, Haley portrays educators such as the kintango, the trainer of men, and the marabout, the man of religion, as well as some oilers, polishers, and carvers. Through the figures of the painter, blacksmith, and firemarker, he directly suggests classical myth. But ultimately he stresses the storyteller, oral historian, and writer. His reader probably associates the basic pattern with the mythical Daedalus, sculptor and artisan of wood, who creates on earth as the god Hephaestus-Vulcan does in Heaven.5 In The Mythology of Greece and Italy, Thomas Keightley writes: Hephaestus must have been regarded originally as simply the fire-god, a view of his character which we find even in the Ilias [sic]. Fire being the great agent in reducing and working the metals, the fire-god naturally became an artist.6 Haley's imagery of wood, cloth, and metal supports the general typology. His process of writing signifies most the craftsman and the creator. When Kunta Kinte kneels at the fireplace and spells out Arabic words, the book achieves a mythic climax and a philosophical depth. Wordmaking marks the creative center in the dramatic fiction. As powerful speakers, Nyoto Boto, the kintango, and Jujali N'jai first foreshadow the lettered Kunta, who expresses his humane skill as woodcarver and blacksmith as well. Then the writer Haley and the mason Tom, Kunta's great grandson, form the denouement of the fiction and respectively relive Kunta's verbal and artistic inclinations. Finally, Kunta undergoes a dramatic reversal in cultural perception, which places both him and Haley in the literary tradition of the Afro-American. The craftsman Kunta Kinte is central to the plot. In 1767 slaveholders took him from his village of Juffure in Gambia, West Africa and slipped MELUS, Volume 9, No. 1, Spring 1982.