They have a daughter, Kizzy, (played by Emyri Crutchfield as a teenager and Anika Noni Rose as an adult), who is sold away from her parents when she is 16, after trying to help another slave escape. He is nursed back to health by Belle, whom he marries. Kunta arrives at the plantation in Virginia in 1767, where he is forced to take a new name and from which he tries to escape multiple times before slave-catchers chop off half his foot. (He’s also using a West African accent over his natural British one, and it’s distancing.) He seems, from the start, like a man, which serves later segments of the story well but makes him less immediately captivating. Kirby, at 27, is older than Burton, as well as quieter and more watchful. The horror of his kidnapping and enslavement was magnified by his youthfulness. His Kunta was energetically adolescent, full of irrepressible high spirits, warm and open. LeVar Burton was 20 when he played Kunta Kinte, but he looked even younger. It is the part of the new version that compares most unfavorably to the old. The first hour of Roots takes place in Juffure and is a coming-of-age tale, one that illustrates the richness of Kunta’s life and culture before he was enslaved. (Hayley is played in brief, needless narration by Laurence Fishburne.) It begins in Juffure, Gambia, in 1750, where Kunta Kinte is born, raised, trained to be a warrior, kidnapped, and shipped across the Atlantic Ocean. Roots traces the history of Alex Haley’s ancestors.
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