Figure 3. Alex Haley listens to Kebba Fofana Kinte, seated with white hat, tell the story of the Kinte family. George Sims, Haley’s friend and research assistant, is seated to Haley’s right. Image courtesy of Dr. David P. Gamble.
Figure 4. Kebba Fofana Kinte, the Gambian elder who told Haley the story of Kunta Kinte. Image courtesy of Dr. David P. Gamble
After Roots was published in 1976 and broadcast the following year to international acclaim, British journalist Mark Ottaway and others raised questions about the reliability of the Kinte family history Haley had heard in the Gambia and about whether Kebba Fofana Kinte was actually a griot.37 Gambian scholar Bakari Sidibe cautioned Haley as early as 1973 about relying too heavily on Kebba Fofana Kinte. Sidibe, for example, wrote Haley with more information on Kebba Fofana Kinte and his relationship to the griot tradition. “Family griots, as part of their hereditary profession, must learn the stories of their patron family,” Sidibe told Haley. “For this reason, the ambitious ones go for detail, chronology, praises, and drama. It is impossible to represent a griot’s performance in writing, which loses much of his style, voice quality, and general showmanship, for they are entertainers.”38 Although Kebba Fofana Kinte adopted this style and was a respected elder in Juffure, Sidibe said that he was not of the specific class of family griots but was instead a drummer and substitute imam. “By birth and by his own views he is not a griot,” Sidibe wrote. Sidibe had sought out an elder from a different branch of the Kinte family and had noted “some glaring contradictions” between the different family histories. To figure out the “contradictions in names, places, and generations,” Sidibe encouraged Haley to interview “members of the five Kinte branches in Gambia . . . including at least one griot from each house” and to put these oral sources together with the available written documents in Gambia.39
While Kebba Fofana Kinte may not have been a griot, he was clearly a skilled storyteller. The “griot embodies entertainment,” Haley later noted. “He was the story-teller, carrier of news. He was the television of his time.”40 For Haley, listening to Kebba Fofana Kinte tell the story of the Kinte clan must have been like looking in a mirror. After pitching Before This Anger for several years, Haley understood that people enjoyed stories that were almost unbelievable, that suspending disbelief was part of the pleasure of the story he was selling. The appeal of Haley’s story was that it was supposed to be impossible for an African American to trace his or her history back, through the abyss of slavery, to a specific African ancestor. Haley traded on this impossibility in developing Roots. In the Gambia, Kebba Fofana Kinte told a compelling and persuasive story that, incredible as it was, Haley was eager to believe. “I attached myself like a mollusk to the mystery,” Haley said.41 Over the next decade, Haley found that agents, publishers, lecture audiences, film producers, readers, and television viewers were also eager to be moved by this remarkable story.
CHAPTER THREE
Speaking Roots
Alex Haley returned from the Gambia in May 1967 with what he knew was a very valuable story. While Roots was still almost a decade from being published, Haley’s incredible research saga paid immediate dividends on the lecture circuit. Haley started lecturing as a client of the W. Colston Leigh speakers’ bureau in the fall of 1966. Over the next decade he crisscrossed the country, speaking at colleges, libraries, historical societies, and corporate meetings. Haley later recalled that rather than marching in “civil rights demonstrations, I marched from airport to airport dragging the ever-present enormous leather bag of Roots research data.”1 Some of his first lectures described the story behind The Autobiography of Malcolm X or featured anecdotes from his Playboy celebrity interviews. Soon, however, Haley started describing his research for Before This Anger in lectures titled “Myth of the Negro Past?,” “Black Heritage,” and “Saga of a People.”2 “When I was asked to speak on another topic designed by my hosts, within five or ten minutes I always managed to shift the ground to Roots,” Haley remembered. “I was obsessive about it. And everywhere I spoke, I found audiences who were moved with me as the story unfolded.”3 A Leigh Bureau brochure assured prospective clients that “Alex Haley has made a remarkable and unique contribution to the American lecture platform through his unfailing gift of saying strong things in a quiet way, and by his ability for holding audiences spell-bound.”4 Haley earned $500 to $1,000 for these early lectures, money he desperately needed to pay for living expenses, research travel, and child support. While Paul Reynolds, Haley’s literary agent, recognized the author’s need for the money, he worried that these lectures would keep Haley from finishing his book. “I dread your spending the time away from the main tent,” Reynolds wrote to Haley after Colston Leigh called Reynolds to ask Haley to accept more lecture bookings. “It is really so vital to you and your career, and your piece of mind with regard to money to get [Before This Anger] done this year.”5 Reynolds was right that lecturing would make it more difficult for Haley to write, but he did not anticipate how important the lectures would be in creating interest in Haley’s story. At each lecture stop Haley also tapped into local media. “I would fly to the place where I was to speak and usually spent the morning taping a television show or doing a live local talk show on television or radio,” Haley recalled. “I met local reporters for interviews in the early afternoon, dined with my hosts and their local committee, gave the lecture, and went on to a reception afterwards.”6 Hundreds of thousands of people heard Haley tell the story of his search for his family’s roots before they read Roots or watched the television series. Neither Doubleday nor ABC could have asked for better promotion. Haley’s extensive advanced marketing of Roots was unprecedented in the history of publishing or television. It is impossible to understand how Roots became a cultural phenomenon in 1976 and 1977 without appreciating how Haley hustled across the country for a decade to build an audience for his story.
Figure 5. Alex Haley gave hundreds of lectures across the country as a client of the W. Colston Leigh speakers’ bureau. Image courtesy of Leigh Bureau.
Haley was a dynamic speaker, and on the lecture circuit he fashioned his research into a dramatic detective story that captivated audiences. He embellished and resequenced events so that he could tell his audiences a story that found him moving quickly (by plane, boat, taxi, and foot) from amazing research discovery to amazing research discovery. “Through his lecturing, Haley has created an oral tradition of his own,” Michael Kirkhorn wrote in the New York Times. “The story of his ancestry is so intimately Haley’s own story that Kunta Kinte seems almost his contemporary; bits of narrative are threaded through his conversation.”7 Just as Haley wanted to believe the Kinte family story he heard in the Gambia, lecture audiences found Haley’s story compelling and persuasive because it was wonderful how all of the pieces of this puzzle fit together just so. Haley told audiences a story that they wanted to believe. For his part, Haley thrived on the energy of sharing his remarkable story with more and more people. “I really do not feel as if I am lecturing, but rather that I am sharing an experience with friends,” Haley wrote to one fan.8
The stories Haley gathered in the Gambia were a sort of currency that increased the value of his lectures. Haley’s research finds in the Gambia also made him bolder in negotiating with people who wanted to buy the film rights to his family saga. Elia Kazan, the prominent stage and film director, was the first to approach Haley about the film rights to Haley’s book. In 1966, Kazan optioned The Autobiography of Malcolm X and started working with James Baldwin and Haley on making the book into a film. Haley and Kazan became friends in the process. Haley called Kazan by his nickname “Gadge” (short for gadget), and Kazan offered Haley his house on Montauk, Long Island, to use as a writer’s retreat. Hearing Haley describe Before This Anger, Kazan thought this family history had the potential to be a motion picture, and he made an offer for the film rights to Haley’s yet-to-be-written book. “Elia Kazan told me that he cannot get the book out of his mind, the motion picture
that it will make, which he wants to be the one to produce and direct,” Haley told Reynolds in April 1967, shortly before Haley took his second trip to the Gambia.9 Given his constant financial problems, Haley was particularly excited about the money to be made from a film. “I think that literally millions will be made by the motion picture, playing, as it will, all over the world. . . . So if we get a good percentage of this movie . . . we just about can’t avoid becoming durably rich!”10
When Haley received Kazan’s offer, it was much lower than expected. On Reynolds’s advice, Haley turned down the bid, which would have paid him $2,500 in advance and another $20,000 if the film was made. (Kazan had previously offered Haley $350,000 if the Malcolm X book was made into a film.)11 “Gadge—Kazan—and I are good, warm friends,” Haley told Reynolds. “I have heard him say, regarding other deals, that friendship and money deals should not be mixed. I know I ain’t even about to, ain’t even thinking about any such price for the motion picture rights of this book. . . . Hence, the thing, obviously, to do is to wait until the book is done; until its momentum is avalanching—when we will have the seller’s market.”12 Haley had a keen sense that each research discovery added additional emotional and economic value to his story.
Haley’s second trip to the Gambia and the story he heard there about Kunta Kinte made him certain that Before This Anger was worth much more than what Kazan had offered. “I know, better than anyone else, better than even you can (since it isn’t readable yet), the book that’s here,” Haley wrote to Reynolds. “Even I don’t fully know yet, because so much is going to happen on that paper. But I know we are going to see this book achieve at least a reception comparable to ‘In Cold Blood,’ and, in fact, probably considerably greater. My theme is vastly greater, and more powerful, and I know the portent of the things I now am feeling as more, more impact material gets added, such as with this last trip. Never before anything like it! Not in its area.”13
In the thousands of letters he wrote, Haley rarely mentioned other books, so it is interesting that he cited Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966), a story about the murder of a Kansas farm family and the search for their killers, as the book he wanted to match or surpass. It is easy to understand why Haley would see Capote as someone to emulate. Capote called In Cold Blood a “nonfiction novel,” and the book mixed journalism with fictional techniques.14 While Haley did not reference New Journalism explicitly, he found common ground with writers like Capote, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe who popularized a blend of journalism and fiction in these years. Haley embraced this mixture of fact and fiction and ended up referring to Roots as a work of “faction” and a “novelized amalgam.” Haley also appreciated and envied the commercial success In Cold Blood had achieved. Columbia Pictures bought the film rights to Capote’s book and released a film version in 1967, the New Yorker published the entire story across four issues, and New American Library paid $500,000 for paperback rights. All together, the New York Times calculated that “Mr. Capote is being paid $14.80 a word for his 135,000-word book.”15 These numbers convinced Haley that he too was writing a potential blockbuster and that he needed to negotiate accordingly. Haley told Reynolds that he planned to take William Fitelson, Kazan’s lawyer, up on Fitelson’s invitation to have dinner with Ralph Ellison, the acclaimed author of Invisible Man (1953). “I am going to whet their appetites a bit,” Haley said. “I am going to take up this invitation after I have some photographs now in development and a few other little handy exhibits, and I’ll do some talking about what I’ve got, just among friends. And let him do some subsequent thinking.”16 It is telling that Haley viewed a dinner invitation with Ralph Ellison, one of the greatest American novelists, as an opportunity to improve his negotiating position with Kazan for the film rights to Before This Anger. Haley never considered himself to be a literary writer on par with Ellison and never aspired to this type of greatness. He chased commercial success of the sort Capote had achieved with In Cold Blood, and if this resulted in literary awards, all the better.
Reynolds was encouraged by Haley’s confidence but wanted to see Haley get Before This Anger down on paper. “Research is essential for any good book,” he told Haley. “It looks to me as if you had magnificent research. There is almost no limit as to the amount of research one can do. Now you must keep your nose to the grind stone and get the book done. When will I be able to see the first 100 pages?”17 While Haley had made little progress on actually writing the book by the summer of 1967, he still promised Doubleday that the final manuscript would be ready by the end of the year. Haley told Lisa Drew, who had started as Ken McCormick’s assistant at Doubleday before becoming an editor, that Before This Anger would be ready “for that August 1968 publication, which will make its appearance most timely—in the nerve-wracking time of these summers, which I truly believe my book is going to do as much as one book can do toward helping positively.”18 Haley was eternally optimistic about his ability to meet deadlines and finish his book. He was also consistently wrong. “I never really thought I was saying what was not accurate,” Haley later said. “I really felt I’d be finished with it in six months.”19
Haley prepared an eighteen-page “working report” on Before This Anger to show Doubleday, Reader’s Digest, and prospective film rights bidders that he was making progress on the book. The report was essentially a book proposal for a book that was already under contract. Haley was desperate to get more money out of the story, whether from the film, paperback, or serialization rights to the book. The report included color pictures of Haley’s trip to the Gambia, including one with Haley, Kebba Fofana Kinte (the elder who had told Haley the Kinte family history), and other members of the Kinte clan. The pictures offered visual evidence to shore up Haley’s compelling stories. “Though distant, by two centuries, we are cousins,” Haley wrote. If Roots was about establishing continuities in black kinship across generations, these photos of Haley surrounded by distant Gambian relatives offered proof of the tremendous genealogical breakthrough Haley claimed to have achieved. In the report Haley also argued that his family’s history was about more than his specific ancestors. “The story tells fundamentally, too, the history of all African slave-descent peoples,” Haley wrote. “For only the slaver ships, and the African-thence-American (or Brazilian, or West Indian) names would differ. So the book I now am writing has a hope to help render a better perspective to the black present, through presenting a black past that is a true, inherently deeply-moving human drama. . . . And my book’s chief goals include something which our total international society has long badly needed: a buoy for the self-esteem, and for the esteem all others hold for, the slave-descent peoples.”20
By the summer of 1967 all of the pieces Haley needed to create this symbolic and uplifting story were falling into place. In addition to the Kinte family history he had heard in the Gambia, Haley pinpointed the specific slave ship, Lord Ligonier, that he believed had transported Kunta Kinte to America. A Reader’s Digest researcher working on Haley’s behalf identified the Lord Ligonier in a London archive.21 With the help of archivists, scholars, and research assistants working in London, Washington, D.C., and Annapolis, Maryland, Haley found more information on the slave ship. These documents tracked the ship’s voyage from London to the Gambia and from the Gambia to Annapolis, where the Lord Ligonier arrived with a cargo that included ninety-eight enslaved Africans (forty-two Africans had died as the ship traversed the Middle Passage).22 Not coincidentally, the dates of the Lord Ligonier’s arrival and slave sale fit perfectly with a deed Haley had found showing John Waller transferring to William Waller an enslaved person named “Toby,” whom Haley believed to be Kunta Kinte. Haley wrote to one of his Gambian collaborators in July 1967 to convey the exciting news about the ship: “The key thing for me is that she [the Lord Ligonier] sailed for Annapolis, Maryland—which is central in the Tidewater Virginia area where I know that Kunta Kinte was landed and bought and taken to a plantation nearby. She was the only ves
sel within about a two-year period which sailed to that particular place, having come directly from James Fort [in the Gambia].”23
Figure 6. Alex Haley seated with members of the Kinte clan in the Gambia, 1967. Image courtesy of Dr. David P. Gamble.
Like much in Haley’s research story, these pieces of evidence do not fit together as neatly as he suggested. Genealogists Gary and Elizabeth Mills examined pre-1767 records from Spotsylvania County, Virginia, and found that while “the document which Haley found does show one Toby in the possession of one John Waller . . . this Waller slave Toby appeared in at least six documents prior to the arrival of the Ligonier.” “Clearly, if Kinte was captured in 1767,” the Millses concluded, “he was not the Waller slave Toby.”24 It is important to remember that Haley was not trained as a historian or genealogist. When he found archival materials or heard stories that fit together he did not wait to pursue different leads or look for conflicting evidence that might trouble the neatness of his story. From Haley’s perspective, he was stitching together disparate documents with oral histories from Tennessee and the Gambia with much larger cultural and commercial goals. “I am thrilled anew each time I work this with material,” Haley wrote to Gambian officials after he identified the Lord Ligonier. “By golly, it never had been done before! How wonderful to think how, via this book, the black people of America will be thrilled (for symbolically it is all of our heritage), and the white people of America will be so vastly educated (for until this very time in history, it popularly has been dismissed that we, the black people, had any heritage to speak of).”25 Haley was less focused on rigorous scholarly accuracy than he was on creating a dramatic and plausible narrative that would be culturally and commercially enriching.
Making Roots Page 6