When Haley returned from his family reunion, Malcolm X was at John F. Kennedy Airport to pick him up. The two men had worked together on the autobiography for over two years and, despite their political and religious differences, considered each other friends. This airport meeting was the last time Haley saw Malcolm X alive. Days before the two were scheduled to meet at Haley’s home in Rome, New York, to review the final manuscript, Malcolm X was assassinated at Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom by members of the Nation of Islam’s Newark mosque.53 Haley wrote to Paul Reynolds the next day to discuss how the royalties from the book might help Betty Shabazz and the couple’s five daughters (Haley and Malcolm X had agreed on a 50/50 split of royalties). “I’m just glad that [the autobiography is] ready for press now at a peak of interest for what will be international large sales, and paperback, and all. I’m just glad that it isn’t a ‘little’ book, but one that can well really provide for his family as he would have wanted.”54 While Haley was eager to forecast royalties for the autobiography, the manuscript was not close to being ready to submit to the press. Complicating matters further, a week later Doubleday cancelled its plans to publish the book, fearing that Malcolm X’s story would be too controversial. Reynolds shopped the book to other publishers, eventually making a deal with Grove Press. Reynolds pushed Haley to finish the epilogue to the autobiography and dissuaded the writer from also trying to write a biography of Malcolm. “People who read the autobiography I don’t think a few months later are going to rush to read a life of Malcolm X,” Reynolds told Haley. “That would be too much Malcolm X for most readers.”55 To the end, Haley viewed Malcolm X more as a fascinating and profitable character than as an inspiration for thinking about black culture, politics, and history in new ways.
Through the summer of 1965, Haley continued working on Before This Anger, often writing late into the night. He was convinced that the book would have broad appeal. “I’ve got, taking shape here under my hands, day by day, nights, too, a book ‘Before This Anger,’ Paul, that’s gonna rock ’em. Black. White. Overseas. Everybody. There has never been published, on this subject, this sweep of subject.”56 Haley also felt himself being drawn into the story of his forebears. “This night’s session, up until this letter, I’ve been with that wagon train, wrenching and creaking over that Cumberland Trail, into Tennessee—where, with whoops of joy they found old crusty, promoter, entrepreneur ‘Chicken George’ waiting,” Haley wrote. “And I tell you, I was there! There were my folks. They were us! The Murrays, slavery behind them, who have trekked Westward, and now are about to prosper. And in the wings . . . await the Haleys—a separate saga. And then Phase Two. The Henning I grew up in. And then Phase Three. The adult me, looking back as a writer upon it all, from The Mandingo down over seven generations to me now.”57
At this stage, Haley also began to compile and synthesize assorted research notes to provide historical context and anecdotes for his family saga. Haley’s childhood friend George Sims spent hours at libraries and archives copying sections of books and articles in longhand to deliver to Haley. “All night until the birds began chirruping in the dawn just outside the window,” Haley wrote, “I sat here just entranced with the material I was copying from my collection of notes for this forthcoming magnificent book. The sweep of it! The saga of it! That Mandingo maverick black human animal as he was described by his daughter. . . . Oh, I tell you it’s a great one, Paul! You just wait!”58 Sims worked closely with Haley over the next decade, traveling with him to the Gambia and elsewhere. Haley eventually paid Sims several thousand dollars a year in compensation for his research assistance.59 “A Latin phrase, fidus achates—devoted companion—accurately describes our relationship,” Haley noted.60
The publication of The Autobiography of Malcolm X in the fall of 1965 increased Haley’s profile as a writer and commentator on black culture, and Haley used the book as a stepping-stone to promote himself and Before This Anger. He wrote to Ken McCormick, his editor at Doubleday, to report, “I’ve recently returned from something of a tour of air, TV and newspaper promotion of the Malcolm X book, and during it I haven’t been able to resist putting in wherever I could some substantial advance plugs for the forthcoming ‘Before This Anger.”61 Doubleday had passed on publishing the Malcolm X autobiography, but Haley assured the publisher that their commitment to his new book would pay dividends. “I’ll tell you something, though: privately, I think the Malcolm X book is going to be outsold by ‘Before This Anger’ probably something at least like ten to one. I base this on how I, as the writer, feel, down deep in my self about the material.”62
By August 1966 Haley had completed the preface to Before This Anger. “This book aspires not only to tell the story of my family, which has treasured its past, and passed it down, and had coalesced around it, and had been inspired by it,” Haley wrote. “But through the actual, and concurrently symbolic experiences of our family, this book aspires to reflect the physical and cultural assimilation of the Negro race, in a microcosm way, from slavery to today. For when you tell the story of one Negro, in the essence you tell the story of all Negroes. We all have essentially the same background: we came in the forebears’ seeds from Africa, and we have physically and culturally been assimilating here since.” Haley’s vision for his project embraced a monolithic view of black history and culture that overlooked the vast diversity of experiences of black people in the United States. Religion, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and other aspects of identity were absent from Haley’s formulation of what it meant to write black history. At the same time, this monolithic view of black history appealed to many people, and Haley found publishers and producers especially receptive to the idea that his story could tell the story of all black people. “We Negroes lack nothing today so much as we lack a sense of history,” Haley continued, paraphrasing Malcolm X’s lecture on Afro-American history. “As badly as we need more education, and more housing, and more jobs, we need yet worse some more sense of history under us. You cannot make a slave of someone who knows his past.” Haley outlined the stakes of appreciating and elevating black history and not so subtly aligned his project with great works of Western art. “When you are securely anchored in history, through literature, you demand respect,” Haley argued. “The English, today poor, still are proud and condescending: they have Shakespeare. The Germans, defeated twice in their lifetimes, are anchored in Beethoven, Goethe, Kant, Schiller, Heine. It is no accident that the Jewish people are planting their roots in Israel.” Haley concluded his pitch for black history by suggesting that he could tell this story in a way that would make readers receptive. “The struggle of the Negro is implicit, or implied, in this book,” he wrote. “I have made effort that it is told by a Negro without undue bitterness, or rancor. My reasons for this are hope that I will retain the documentary value, that readers will not ‘tune out’ but will bear with us.”63 While Haley was still a decade away from finishing his book, this preface outlined a clear vision for the book’s mission. After reading Elia Kazan’s America, America (1964), the filmmaker’s story of his uncle’s immigration from Greece, Haley scribbled a note that foreshadowed the eventual title of his own family story: “The Negro has been in the bark, trunk, roots, leaves—throughout the family tree of America.”64
The path to Roots, however, was not smooth. Haley’s financial trouble grew increasingly dire in the fall of 1966. An outstanding tax debt led the IRS to take all of Haley’s royalties ($1,432.83) from the Malcolm X book for that period. Haley was philosophical about his debt issues but recognized that dealing with the IRS took time away from writing. “I feel that I am still lucky in a way, though,” he wrote to Reynolds. “Early in the game, before I make any real money, which I will be doing, lots of it—I am learning, the painful way, about how debts can be not only a nuisance day by day, but worse, in the process they eat up time one could be spending writing. I would be willing to bet that since that tax lien went on, forcing me to scrabble hither, thither to earn living money, at least o
ne-fourth of my time has gone to writing letters to creditors, or otherwise trying to assuage and piecemeal pay them—at least enough time to have written some kind of book.”65
With these tax troubles looming, Before This Anger was Haley’s light at the end of the tunnel. Haley promised Reynolds that the book would establish him as a major author. “Here’s a prophecy for your memoirs: I’m nursing a great book, Paul. It’s going to be a landmark work; a major award-winning, world best-seller. With this one, I’ll curtsy to no author you ever handled. My simple reduction: I, too, can write. And none of them have worked with material any more powerful, if as powerful, as mine.”66 Reflecting on how well The Autobiography of Malcolm X had sold, Haley continued, “I know I will make my family name, Haley, famed far beyond Malcolm X.”67
Haley’s hubris seems laughable today given that Malcolm X is regarded as an iconic figure. While Haley never lacked for self-assurance, this particular emphasis on making his family name famous may have been fueled by his father’s deteriorating health. Simon Haley was hospitalized in 1966 for cerebral arteriosclerosis (hardening of the walls of the brain arteries) and congestive heart failure.68 Alex’s brother George visited their father at the Veterans Administration hospital. “We have a problem,” George wrote to his siblings. “It is an extremely painful experience for me to visit Dad. Most of the time when I’ve been there, his mind is perfectly clear and then he starts hallucinating.”69 Alex Haley and his father corresponded regularly in the mid-1960s, and Simon, when his health allowed, helped gather family pictures and stories for his son’s book. Simon understood why Alex would focus on his maternal lineage (“The Murrays are remarkable,” Simon wrote at one point) but hoped that Alex would also consider writing about the Haley side of the family.70 “As your book Before This Anger is due in 1967,” Simon wrote, “I think the Haley book should follow soon after as a story available for all the Haley clan. You remember we both are in Who’s Who in Colored America.”71 Simon Haley was disappointed that his oldest son had not finished college, but the success of the Malcolm X autobiography made him appreciate Alex’s career as a writer. His father described the book as “equivalent to getting your Ph.D.”72 Alex Haley was certain that Before This Anger would make his father even more proud.
Haley’s confidence that Before This Anger would be a best seller and his tax troubles made him increasingly frustrated that Doubleday was reluctant to advance him any more money for the project. He told Reynolds that the scope of the book project was much larger than when he had signed the contract with Doubleday and that he needed to travel to Africa and Europe for research. “Time and again, I tried to convey to Doubleday that as I kept up research, based upon my seminal data, the book kept growing in its scope, and stature,” Haley wrote. “It has become a 200-year chronicle, a sweeping saga; time and again I have tried to convey that to accomplish its research, I need more than $2200! I was trying to suggest, like, Look, fellows, you’re publishing this! The contract’s amendable. It’s not the Constitution. Support me, help me—it’s going to be a great book, a great seller!”73
By March 1967, Haley was unsure when he would ever be able to finish the book. “Before This Anger simply isn’t going to get written, under my circumstances at present,” he told Reynolds. “It won’t get written until I can get enough money, at one time, to pay off sundry debt harassments, to be able to do the sustained concentrating on this book. . . . I hate all of this floundering around, necessitated by money-need. . . . The point is I need money, now, to write the book. . . . If I’d had operational money, this book now could have been in bookstores.”74
Reynolds told Haley that one way to get more money would be to sell the paperback rights to Before This Anger. “I love your idea of proposing the book to several major paperback houses—for their making bids,” Haley replied. “So its squarely up to me to present the most exciting possible package. You know that I can verbally present the book effectively, to these various paperback people you select to hear and bid.”75 Haley told Reynolds that if Doubleday would not approve the paperback sale, “well, then, tonight I am going to put my ‘Before this Anger’ materials carefully back into their cartons, and carry them upstairs. And I’m going to start tomorrow working on some magazine stuff. And I will resume work on the book when I get—enough—working money.”76 Frustrated with his Doubleday contract and facing pressure from the publisher for already missing three deadlines to complete Before This Anger, Haley was defiant. “I just happen to be that necessary evil, the writer,” he told Reynolds. “Nobody is going to get this book until I write it. And the book that is here, the Olympian chronicle, my family, my forebears, I am not going to half-write. It is going to have from me what its magnitude demands, and that is the very uttermost that I can give to it. I hope Doubleday sees fit to help.”77
Reynolds tried to talk Haley out of walking away from the project. “I don’t want to argue with you, I want to help,” Reynolds began. “The contract with Doubleday for ‘Before This Anger’ was signed the summer of 1964, long before your autobiography of Malcolm X was published and long before you could get the kind of money you can get today. People weren’t paying in ’64 what they’re paying today and you were relatively unknown. Let’s grant it was a mistake if you want to. It was also stipulated that the book would be delivered January 1, 1966, fourteen months ago. . . . When a publisher has a firm contract at one price it’s awfully hard to make him pay more money. From his point of view why should he?”78 Reynolds reminded Haley that finishing the book was the best solution to his money problems. “We’ve got to get Before this Anger done,” Reynolds wrote. “It’s a potential enormous money maker.”79 Reynolds urged Haley to start showing Doubleday some manuscript pages soon because they “are beginning to get scared you’ll never write the book.”80
Haley’s experience in developing Before This Anger taught him that for commercial writers words equal money. He cared deeply about tracing his family’s history and was energized by reading histories of West Africa, slavery, and early America. At the same time, Haley never stopped thinking of his family history as a story to be pitched, polished, and sold. These motivations eventually led him to take his first trip to Africa. In the Gambia Haley heard stories that gave his book even more emotional and economic potential than he had dreamed.
CHAPTER TWO
The Gambia
“The Union Jack fluttered down over Gambia at midnight this morning,” the New York Times reported on February 18, 1965, “bringing an end to the last outpost of colonial rule in West Africa and giving Africa its smallest and poorest independent state.”1 From its coast on the Atlantic Ocean, the Gambia stretches three hundred miles east in a narrow strip of land surrounded by Senegal. (The country is referred to as “the Gambia” to differentiate it from the river after which the country was named.) The Gambia River made the country a small but important trading post, first for the Portuguese and later for the French and British. These European powers fought over control of the territory and transported hundreds of thousands of enslaved people from the country’s ports from the mid-1600s to the early 1800s. In 1965, the British paid for half the cost of the fireworks display to celebrate Gambia’s independence but left the country politically and economically unstable. “We are entering into independence with many grave problems,” said David Jawara, the Gambia’s first prime minister.2 When Alex Haley’s ancestral quest led him to the Gambia two years later, Gambian officials were eager to help and hoped that the author’s search for roots would benefit the newly independent nation.
Haley first identified the Gambia as his ancestral home while touring the West Coast to promote The Autobiography of Malcolm X in December 1965. Haley told San Francisco Chronicle literary editor William Hogan that he believed his ancestor had arrived in South Carolina from the Gambia in 1766.3 Haley had previously identified his original African ancestor as “the Mandinka” (or simply “the African”). While Haley later claimed that several fortuitous research fin
ds in 1966 pointed him to the Gambia, it is likely that he identified the Gambia, among other West African nations, because the Mandinka ethnic group made up a large percentage of the Gambia’s population. He may also have focused on the Gambia after reading the work of Scottish explorer Mungo Park, who focused on the Gambia River in parts of Travels in the Interior of Africa (1799) and later works (Haley’s archives include several photocopies from Park’s books, and Park is the source that appears most frequently in Haley’s notes on the history of the Gambia).4 Whatever the case, once Haley settled on the Gambia the country assumed a mythic importance in his research for Before This Anger.
In August 1966, Haley wrote Ken McCormick, his editor at Doubleday, to promise that the manuscript would be completed soon and mentioned his intention of traveling to the Gambia. “I plan to travel-write the last chapter—to Gambia, Africa,” Haley wrote, “to walk by the river where the old slave-loading station is located; thence by ship across the old slave-trade route; thence by car, to walk on the ground of each of the former plantations where my forebears were slaves.” Haley called this chapter “Sentimental Journey” and anticipated that writing it would be an “emotional experience.”5 To prepare for his trip, Haley went to the Gambian embassy in Washington, D.C., and sought out Gambian exchange students, both in the nation’s capital and closer to his new home in upstate New York, to talk with them about his research. “All are fascinated,” he said. “They assure me high-level entrée in their country, assure me every cooperation. I have just got to get there, symbolically to visit physically where that slave ship loaded my great x7-grandfather.”6
Making Roots Page 4