The program is not going to be the huge, sweeping consciousness-raiser that ABC's epochal "Roots" was in 1977. Even though that history of slavery was filled with fictional characters and anecdotes, it was the most intense confrontation with the shame of slavery that the nation had ever experienced, and millions of Americans were riveted to their TV sets for the week in which the miniseries aired.
PBS's version is, of course, far more factual and much less soap operatic. It does include reenactments, however, most of them played back in sleepy slow-motion for some strange reason -- and most of them ineffectively staged and photographed. There is reason to doubt the wisdom of including the reenacted whippings of runaway slaves, or other slaves being punished arbitrarily, because it gives the production a tawdry aura that recalls ghastly Hollywood potboilers like 1975's "Mandingo."
Actor Don Cheadle with Sudanese refugee children in Chad, on tonight's "Nightline."
(Rick Wilkinson -- ABC News)
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The impressive parts of "Slavery" are the case studies of individuals about whose lives more is known than previously thanks to years of industrious research. One of the most fascinating figures emerges in the third hour: Harriet Jacobs, who learned how to read and write -- contrary to the usual slave owner rules -- and wrote a book, "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl."
Jacobs was a victim of slavery in more than one sense -- she was lusted after, even when only 12, by the doctor who owned the plantation and is believed to have fathered 11 children by his slaves. Jacobs describes him as a "vile monster." At 15, she took another white man as a lover to discourage the aging doctor's advances and to protect her from him. Eventually she ran away and spent part of her life in a tiny, rodent-infested attic in the home of her freed grandmother.
Even as slavery was just taking hold in the New World, on the island later to be known as Manhattan there were brave souls who tried to assert their human rights -- among them a woman known only as Frances who successfully used the courts to fight back. Before much longer, however, there would be virtually no protection by law for African Americans trapped in slavery, because slave trading became "the basis of an international economy" and its spread "an essential part of the expansion of capitalism."
The horror of it, the shame of it and the degree to which it represents evil cannot be adequately captured, of course, by even the most earnest documentarians. Flawed though it is, "Slavery" still qualifies as essential viewing for those who want to learn and try to understand how a nation loudly founded on "freedom" could let such an abomination thrive and why it took the bloodiest war in American history to banish it.
Nightline (30 minutes), at 11:35 p.m. on Channel 7.
Slavery and the Making of America (2 hours), at 9 p.m. on Channels 22 and 26; Part 2, next Wednesday at the same time.
