Haley first mentioned Before This Anger to Reynolds in early September 1963. Hard at work on the Malcolm X book, Haley sent Reynolds a few pages from the new project to highlight how his views differed from those of the black Muslim leader. Before This Anger, Haley wrote, would portray “the pastoral simplicity and the root Christian culture of the 1930s Southern Negro—who migrated to the ghettos where he was fermented into today’s black racism that has given us Malcolm X.”25 “You mentioned that after this project, we would talk of others,” Haley wrote. “I have it, Mr. Reynolds. I guarantee you a fine book, perfect for these times, its title to be ‘Before the Anger.’ Whenever we have lunch, I will want to tell you about it.”26 Haley’s staid demeanor and political views (he was a moderate Republican) made it easy for him to distinguish himself from Malcolm X. While the two men grew closer during the months they worked together on the autobiography, Haley regularly used Malcolm X and the fury of black militants as foils to advance Before This Anger.
Reynolds met Haley in the midst of changes in the author’s personal life. In fall 1963, Haley got engaged to Juliette Collins, an airline stewardess he had met while traveling for a magazine assignment. The couple was married in 1964 just months after Haley ended his marriage to his first wife, Nan. (Haley and Nan were still married when he and Juliette became engaged, and Nan later claimed that she never signed divorce papers.)27 Reynolds hosted a surprise engagement party for the new couple at his home in Chappaqua, New York. “I so much enjoyed your surprise party, and so did Julie, who is so impressed with sudden entry into a world where she meets such important people,” Haley wrote. In his library, Reynolds displayed books dedicated to him by the authors he had represented. Haley noted the names—Richard Wright, Irving Wallace, Conrad Richter, William Shirer—and resolved that he too would write significant books. I “so much enjoy being your client,” Haley wrote, and “it shouldn’t be any secret that it’s my full intent to make your investment of time and interest in my development as an author prove to be variously worthwhile.”28
Haley also kept Reynolds apprised of his money problems, which fluctuated between moderate and severe over the next decade. “I’m plain broke,” Haley admitted in the fall of 1963. “I am hoping that this dramatic Malcolm X book will end this for me from here in.”29 In addition to the Malcolm X project, Haley and Reynolds communicated regularly about Before This Anger and other book and magazine ideas that could lead to book contracts and advances to pay Haley’s bills.
After a walk on a cold January morning in 1964, for example, Haley wrote to Reynolds to pitch an idea for a book called How to Co-exist with Negroes. “Visualize this title on paperback stands, Paul. Instantly, to white people, it evokes their own subjective concerns, and that subject in the air . . . all around them. . . . Inevitably, the 300+ years of segregation have caused average white people to know little of the ‘inside’ of Negroes. This book, in some ways, is a kind of manual.” Haley also expected black readers to be drawn to the book, through in a sort of sideways manner. “Negroes will consider much of the book naïve,” Haley wrote. “The title, to the average Negro, certainly at least to this one, sounding so gratuitously condescending, would spark irritation, with which motivation we’d also get the Negroes’ 75 cents.”30 Haley saw How to Co-exist with Negroes as perfectly suited to the state of race relations in America in 1964. “Harmful emotions are attached to ‘integration’ and ‘Civil Rights,’” Haley wrote. “To drain some of these emotions is among this book’s chief ambitions. I have the temerity to feel that, for harmony, much more the true goal, the true perspective, should be white-Negro Co-Existence.”31 While How to Co-exist with Negroes never advanced beyond the idea stage, this pitch outlines how Haley saw an untapped market for books that were about race relations but that would not be particularly challenging to readers’ sensibilities. Haley, in short, wanted to start conversations about race rather than arguments.
Haley initially approached Before This Anger with similar ambitions. “I know what this book will do, in these times,” he wrote to Reynolds in the summer of 1964. “I know what I have to say, and that it needs to be said. I know, I feel, the strength of my position as a Negro, writing, who is not given to violent protest, but who can say powerful things of a nature that people will think about, say them to both white people, today the fad, and also to Negroes, who need, amid the fad today, need [sic] very badly to look squarely at themselves, and see their mistakes.”32 As Haley wrote these words in the summer of 1964, black freedom struggles gripped the nation. Thousands of young people traveled to Mississippi for Freedom Summer to join local grassroots activists in a campaign to register African American voters. In Washington, D.C., President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 after a lengthy filibuster by southern congressmen. Racial uprisings drew attention to long-simmering racial tensions in several northern cities, such as Chicago, Harlem, Philadelphia, and Rochester. Against this backdrop, Haley pitched himself as a moderate black author who could tap into the national interest in race relations without turning off white readers. The New York Times, for example, asked Haley to write an article regarding the racial unrest in Harlem in the summer of 1964. “They wanted a piece wherein Harlem’s ‘responsible’ citizens would condemn the riots,” Haley recalled. “I asked and asked different such citizenry, who didn’t condemn them as the Times desired. So the Times paid my expenses and I told them and they told me no hard feelings.”33
At the end of the long hot summer of 1964, Haley had a contract from Doubleday for Before This Anger. He initially promised Doubleday that he would finish Before This Anger by the end of the year, describing it as “Doubleday’s softly powerful Christmas 1964 release.”34 “The country needs this book, I think—with its healing nature.”35 In reality, Haley had not yet written more than a few pages of Before This Anger when Doubleday offered him an advance contract for the project. The book existed only in Haley’s letters and spoken presentations to his agent and editors. Reynolds had previously cautioned Haley about the danger of signing contracts for books that were not close to being finished. “I think it’s not very good business,” Reynolds told Haley when the author considered an offer from Putnam Publishing for a different project. “I think you can get more money than Putnam offers and what will happen is you will have used up the money and will have an obligation on your shoulders to write the book and nearly all books take longer than the author thinks.” Reynolds concluded, “I know it’s tough but signing contracts long before you can do the books is just a form of borrowing and you’re paying the equivalent of a terribly high interest because you’re not getting the best kind of contracts.”36
Reynolds offered sound advice, but Haley was not in a financial position to take it. Haley signed a contract with Doubleday for Before This Anger in August 1964, agreeing to a $5,000 advance to be paid in segments after he completed parts of the manuscript. Upon signing the deal he received a check for $900.37 Haley signed the contract at an airport awaiting a flight back to New York after interviewing Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. for Playboy. “I think it’s a fine contract, and I intend with this book to go for recognition as an author who has something to say,” Haley wrote to Reynolds.38 While Haley was initially happy to sign the contract and receive the much-needed money, he quickly came to feel Doubleday did not value the scope of the project he was undertaking. This bad contract left Haley scrambling for the money he needed to research and write his major book. Over the coming years Haley’s excitement with the commercial potential of Before This Anger and his frustration with Doubleday grew simultaneously.
In Haley’s early vision for the book that became Roots, Africa is barely mentioned. This is especially curious since Haley spent hours discussing, recording, and interpreting the life of Malcolm X. After breaking with the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X took two trips to Africa and the Middle East in 1964 that shaped many of his ideas about religion, race, history, and politics. Malcolm’s travels to Africa were among the
most important events in his life, but to Haley they were an inconvenience that would potentially delay their work on The Autobiography of Malcolm X. “Malcolm X is apparently now, for the last several weeks, involved in skip-about visiting of some fifteen countries,” Haley wrote to Reynolds. “I am a little irked at him that such protracted absence from this country with very spotty contact with us isn’t the kind of cooperation that is needed with a very large book being dealt with. . . . I am a little put-out that he has rather crossed up the project by, one, staying away so long and, two, his new conversion, but certainly both are his business, I suppose.”39
Despite the popular idea that Malcolm X turned Haley on to Africa, nothing in Haley’s correspondence or interviews suggests that he was deeply influenced by Malcolm X’s travels to the continent. Malcolm X did inspire Haley in other ways, however. Haley watched Malcolm X speak on several occasions, before both black and white groups, and must have come to appreciate his ability to captivate an audience. Haley came from a family of storytellers, but Malcolm X taught him to move a crowd through pacing and the careful sequencing of details, arguments, and anecdotes. Haley developed his own unique style on the lecture circuit and joined Malcolm X as one of the great public speakers of the era. Malcolm X’s personality also captivated Haley. Reader’s Digest had a feature called “My Most Unforgettable Character” that profiled celebrities and interesting people, and in many ways Haley adopted this model for his own writing. Haley considered Malcolm X to be a “maverick,” a character type he held in the highest regard. “The mavericks keep our society aerated,” Haley wrote. “They keep us from settling into deteriorating apathy, lethargy, complacency. The mavericks test us, spur us, irritate us; they prick, and nudge, goad, and prod at our tendency—which can be so fatal—to ‘hide’ behind semantical words, and phrases, to be lulled by ‘Big Brother’ politically and in our customs and institutions . . . while our dangerous, growing problems are thus obscured.”40 It was not a coincidence that Haley also described his original African ancestor as a “maverick.”
While Malcolm X traveled to Africa in 1964, Haley turned his attention elsewhere, traveling to Henning, Tennessee. “I’m going coach on the train, with a whole box full of fried chicken and sweet potato pie, to be authentic in nostalgic return,” Haley wrote to Reynolds in October 1964. “For that’s the way virtually all Negroes in the 1930s left their little Hennings all over the South and went North dreaming to ‘do good’ in Chicago.”41 Haley left New York for Tennessee just days after his wife Julie gave birth to a baby girl, Cynthia, the couple’s first child and Haley’s third.42 In Henning, Haley interviewed dozens of senior citizens about southern life in the 1920s and 1930s. Haley was entranced by the small town of his youth and was excited to write back to New York on forty-year-old stationery he found from his grandfather’s lumber company. “I’m talking with the old people—some, now, are up into their 90s, and I’m getting just great additive material,” Haley wrote. “More than ever I’m confident that this will be a successful, significant, needed book.”43 Back home in New York, Haley remained excited about how the Henning stories he heard were shaping up into a book. “It was just terrific there!” he wrote. “I got material far surpassing what I had remembered, or expected. We’ve a great book coming up in this ‘Before This Anger.’ You just watch. It’s one of the kind of jobs where you tap the keys of the typewriter gently, watching the words form before your eyes.”44
In January 1965, Haley traveled to Kansas for a family reunion and to celebrate his younger brother George’s election as a Republican state senator. Talking with aunts, uncles, and cousins sparked Haley’s imagination and expanded his ambitions for Before This Anger. Haley wrote a long letter to Paul Reynolds to describe the “exhilarating” conversations with his family’s elders:
Paul, incredible as it seems, I am going to be able to start that family story with the original African who was taken into slavery. Two lucky facts make this possible: He happened to be one of the later slaves taken—one of the Mandingo tribe. Secondly, the family, all the way back, has been blessed with story-tellers, who passed the stories down. The Mandingo (isn’t that an odd way to have to refer to your great-great-great-great grandfather?) was, it is passed down, “a mean critter.” He was one of a cargo of slaves taken from interior West Africa circa 1780. They were taken first to the British West Indes [sic] where they were “broken” for slavery, then he sailed to the U.S. For some reason, seemingly precise and correlated as the story is in some of its details, his name no one seems ever to have heard.45
This story of the “original African” dramatically shifted the center of gravity in Haley’s book project. “The Mandingo,” whom Haley later identified as Kunta Kinte, was not part of the book Haley had sold to Doubleday just five months prior. This meant that Before This Anger would start, not in Henning in the 1920s, but several generations earlier.
Haley continued to outline for Reynolds the genealogy he had heard at the family reunion. “The Mandingo sired a number of children on the several plantations to which he was successively sold,” Haley wrote. “He was still ‘mean,’ he was beaten a good deal, but he was, the story goes, extremely strong and resilient. It was one of his last children, a daughter, who subsequently told the story of her father to her son, a slave lad who grew up, being sold only once, to the Master of a North Carolina tobacco plantation, where this slave lad reached adulthood, with the story intact. This slave lad became known on this plantation, in mid-to-late ’teens as ‘Chicken George.’”46 Haley described to Reynolds how, shortly before the Civil War, “‘Chicken George’ wandered off, leaving behind a wife and seven children.” Haley explained this by noting, “Slave family-ties were not very binding in those days.”47
Haley came away from this family reunion with the skeletal structure for his family genealogy, but there are several important differences between this early version and the story he later told on the lecture circuit and published in Roots. In Roots, a slave ship takes Kunta Kinte directly from the Gambia to Annapolis, without a stop in the West Indies. In Roots, rather than fathering “a number of children on several plantations,” Kunta Kinte is celibate until his late thirties and has only one daughter, Kizzy. Most notably, Haley’s early version of his family’s story makes no mention of the words Kin-tay, Ko, or Kamby Bolongo. In the story Haley told about his search for his ancestors, these k-words were the key linguistic clues that had been passed down across generations. “In the oral history that Grandma, Aunt Liz, Aunt Plus, Cousin Georgia, and the others had always told on the boyhood Henning front porch, I had an unknown quotient in those strange words or sounds passed on by the African,” Haley wrote in Roots in 1976. “‘Kin-tay,’ he had said, was his name. ‘Ko’ he had called a guitar. ‘Kamby Bolongo’ he had called a river in Virginia. They were mostly sharp, angular sounds, with k predominating.”48 Haley described in Roots how he brought these “phonetic snatches” to Dr. Jan Vansina, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin who was an expert on African linguistics and oral traditions. “The most involved sound I had heard and brought was Kamby Bolongo, my ancestor’s sound to his daughter Kizzy as he had pointed to the Mattaponi River in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. Dr. Vansina said that without question, bolongo meant, in the Mandinka tongue, a moving water; preceded by ‘Kamby,’ it could indicate the Gambia River. I’d never heard of it.”49 Vansina did host Haley at his home in Madison in the fall of 1967, but at that point Haley had already made two research trips to the Gambia and had traveled by boat up the Gambia River in search of stories about his ancestors.
It is difficult, even in Haley’s earliest versions of the story, to separate fact from fiction. The elders’ stories blend into Haley’s story and both borrow liberally from popular narratives about slavery. “There are fascinating stories of the decline of the plantation during the war,” Haley told Reynolds in recounting the family reunion. “The Master and Mistress had no children, only their slaves. There is a misty drama of
how, the war over, the slaves were assembled in the yard and the Master and Mistress on the Big House portico read (the Master did) that the slaves were now free. The Master and Mistress, and the slaves, were crying. ‘I—I guess it means . . . you all . . . don’t have to call me . . . “Master” . . . no more’—I tell you, Paul, what a scene!”50 Here Haley’s family story resembles the romanticized stories of the antebellum South and kind slave owners that Roots would later challenge.
If the accuracy of these stories is difficult to judge, one thing that emerges clearly is that Haley always thought about his family history as a story he could sell. Haley believed that being able to trace his story back to the “original African” would make Before This Anger even more appealing to readers and more important to the country. “You know, Paul? In America, I think, there has not been such a book,” Haley wrote to his agent. “‘Rooting’ a Negro family, all the way back, telling the chronicle, through us, of how the Negro is part and parcel of the American saga. Without rancor, which I do not feel, which has not been my experience in any influencing way. It is a book which I so deeply feel that America, the world, needs to read. For its drama, for its authentic image, for other reasons. I shall write it, when I get to the writing, with love.”51 Reynolds responded quickly and enthusiastically. He encouraged Haley to “do some research work on the Mandingo” and wrote, “This book is going to be a beauty. . . . Everything isn’t money, but I think this book is going to make you a great deal of money and a great deal of prestige.”52
In Haley’s vision for the book that grew into Roots, emotions and economics were always intertwined. He was emotionally moved by the idea of being able to identify his family’s “original African,” and he was excited by the money that such a story might bring him. Haley’s eagerness to profit from genealogy and the history of slavery is probably discomforting to many people, but it is important to recognize that Before This Anger/Roots was always a commercial venture. Everything that happened with the project from 1963 to 1977 was about bringing Haley’s family story to larger and more remunerative audiences. What is surprising is not that financial motivations propelled Haley but that his story’s ability to move people emotionally grew apace.
Making Roots Page 3