Talking about his search for his family’s roots helped Haley improve his story. Author Frank Chin, who worked in 1969 as a screenwriter for a film version of Haley’s story that was not produced, heard Haley tell his story before three different audiences. “You say that you enjoy telling the story over and over again before different people because the process of questions and answers that follows the telling often gives you new insight into your story . . . somehow makes it grow in implications and meaning,” Chin wrote to Haley. “[This] seems to me to be a way of saying that the reactions of others forces [sic] you to refine and perfect both historical and emotional accuracy. Obviously you’re still searching and probing yourself and your material for meanings, personal meanings as well as historical and cultural ramifications.”26 When Haley stood at a lecture podium at Simpson College in Indianola, Indiana, or Virginia State College in Petersburg, Virginia, he could see immediately how audiences responded to his story. He could tell which aspects made people laugh or cry, which stories captured attention, and which anecdotes bored people. Haley honed his family story over the course of dozens of lectures before finishing the first chapter of his book.
Haley’s lectures also gave him a chance to see firsthand how the story of his search for roots moved people across racial, regional, and national lines. “I have seen in arch-conservative Orange County, California, literally black-jacketed, beret-wearing Black Panthers and banker-dressed, suburbia-type male and female white people standing side by side, applauding, cheering,” Haley wrote to a Reader’s Digest editor. “And in Florida, and in Georgia, and in Alabama, and in Ohio, and in New York, and wherever.”27 Like an advertising executive adding up demographics or a political consultant counting constituencies, Haley defined success as reaching the largest possible audience. These responses made Haley even more certain of his book’s tremendous cultural and commercial potential. Before This Anger, Haley predicted in 1969, “is going to do, in this present social problem we have, something comparable . . . to what ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ did in another time—this book in [sic] an overwhelming healing direction through a vastly increased emotional effect upon black, upon white alike. About the world; you watch!”28 Early in 1964, Haley published a nuanced essay in the New York Times on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel and the lasting influence of the “Uncle Tom” image that illuminates why he wanted to compare Before This Anger to Stowe’s book. Haley noted the “global renown” Stowe’s work had achieved and admired “the novel’s indisputable historical role” in fostering antislavery sentiments. “It is a deep irony that, a century later, the very name of Mrs. Stowe’s hero is the worst insult the slaves’ descendants can hurl at one another out of their frustrations in seeking what all other Americans take for granted,” Haley wrote. Haley argued that Uncle Tom took on negative connotations after Stowe’s story had been “vulgarized” in “terribly caricatured” theatrical performances. “For generations, hundreds of ‘Tom’ companies played and replayed every American city and hamlet outside the South,” Haley observed. “Translations by the dozen thrived no less in the homelands of countless future American immigrants. When finally, in the nineteen-twenties, automobiles and movies killed history’s most successful theatrical venture, some 70 years of repetition had infected the Western world with an incalculably poisonous ‘Topsy’ and ‘Uncle Tom’ image of the American Negro.” The lesson Haley took from Uncle Tom’s Cabin was that popular culture had real power to shape images of black people and that once stories became part of mass culture the meanings of these stories could change for good or ill. On the mass culture reach of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Haley could have quoted novelist Henry James, who called Stowe’s novel a “wonderful ‘leaping’ fish” that “could naturally fly anywhere.” “If the amount of life represented in such a work is measurable by the ease with which representation is taken up and carried further, carried even violently to the furthest,” James wrote, “the fate of Mrs. Stowe’s picture was conclusive: it simply sat down wherever it lighted and made itself, so to speak, at home.”29 Haley might also have noted how his friend James Baldwin used Uncle Tom’s Cabin to critique the idea that protest novels could change society. “The ‘protest’ novel, so far from being disturbing, is an accepted and comforting aspect of the American scene, ramifying that framework we believe to be so necessary,” Baldwin wrote. “Whatever unsettling questions are raised are evanescent, titillating; remote, for this has nothing to do with us, it is safely ensconced in the social arena, where, indeed, it has nothing to do with anyone, so that finally we receive a very definite thrill of virtue from the fact that we are reading such a book at all.”30 Like James and Baldwin, Haley saw clearly that popular culture was powerful and dangerous terrain and optimistically believed his family history could do important and positive work in this regard.31
Haley had always been skilled at selling his story by speaking directly to people. He pitched Before This Anger to Doubleday in 1964 over a lunch meeting and captivated television producers David Wolper and Stan Margulies at a similar meeting a decade later. Haley described a particularly memorable lunch with Reader’s Digest editors. “Over the soup, I stood up and began walking about the room,” Haley recalled. “I didn’t feel like eating. I began describing my researching already. And without myself realizing it, I became impassioned, exhorting and gesticulating. My feeling was that these editors had to see, to feel, to understand what I did. They had to understand what might be possible, for the first time in the history of the Negroes, who were one-tenth of America’s population.”32 Pacing about the room, Haley started acting out Chicken George and other characters from the book. By this point the editors had stopped eating and the cook and waiters were standing at the kitchen door listening intently. “We were all startled when I stopped,” Haley wrote. “I had been exhorting for three and one half hours. I felt drained, empty—and suddenly I didn’t care if the editors had understood or not.”33 As always, Haley’s storytelling was successful, and Reader’s Digest agreed to give him the travel money he needed. Similarly, after the film deal with Elia Kazan fell through, Haley’s entertainment lawyer Lou Blau arranged a new deal with Columbia Pictures and invited the Columbia executives to hear Haley speak at Beverly Hills High School in 1968. Haley’s lecture helped persuade the executives to option the film rights to Before This Anger for $50,000.34
When Doubleday pressured Haley to finish the book, he encouraged the editors and executives to attend one of his lectures at New York University law school. “I think it would be most effective if they could see, and hear, a sophisticated, packed, metropolitan audience response to the inherent content, the inherent everybody-identification, the inherent emotion of this book,” Haley wrote to Reynolds.35 Haley wanted Doubleday to see that, on his own initiative, he had generated in advance “a huge market for a book. By now I have spoken of this book literally across this nation, back and forth and again, to collectively about three-quarters of a million people. . . . It is, indeed, a book born of talk.”36 Haley wrote to Reynolds again after the NYU lecture to say that he hoped Doubleday now had “some visual and aural appreciation of the way that by now literally hundreds of thousands of people (in audiences for three years) across the country [are] awaiting this book—and you can project what that is going to be mean in terms of a virtual instant explosion of sales . . . of the hardcover!”37 Haley’s speaking engagements across the country amounted to one of the largest advance publicity campaigns in the history of publishing or television.
Haley predicted that his would be the first hardcover book to sell one million copies, a bold prediction that proved accurate. “With Doubleday’s HELP, we can do it,” he told Reynolds. “Though I will tell you right now, I intend to do all possible of the promotion MYSELF—the surest way!”38 Reynolds praised Haley’s speaking skills but as usual wanted to see Haley actually write Before This Anger. “You were perfectly magnificent as a speaker,” Reynolds wrote. “I once heard Clarence Darrow speak and he spoke over two ho
urs and held his audience. I thought he was the only man in the world who could do that. Now I’ve met a second one who could. However, I’m a man for writing rather than speaking. So on with the completion of the book.”39 When Reynolds offered these words of encouragement, Haley’s book was still five years away from being completed. Haley’s family saga, however, was starting to come into focus.
In early 1972, Haley changed the working title of his book from Before This Anger to Roots. “Have changed the title to one I like better . . . as nearly everyone does: ‘Roots,’” Haley wrote to a friend. “Numerous good reasons. One, primarily, the more I have written, the more it has impressed itself upon me that there is so much more to the black saga than the topical ‘Anger.’ And that new title, ‘Roots,’ is more generic among mankind, and I see this book, really, as kind of the black slice of the human saga.”40 Shortly thereafter Haley landed a cover story in the New York Times Magazine titled “My Furthest Back Person—‘The African,’” that put in print the story he had been telling in lectures over the past several years.41 The Wall Street Journal ran a front-page story, “Black Genealogy,” that focused on Haley’s newly titled Roots. “In recent years growing numbers of black Americans—many of them inspired by Mr. Haley’s success—have begun digging into family Bibles, marriage and property records and other sources, attempting to reconstruct their family trees,” the article informed readers.42 An old friend from Hamilton College wrote to rib Haley about his extensive media exposure in 1972: “Alex has a cover on the TIMES Mag . . . Alex is front pg in the Wall Street Journal . . . Alex is in Africa sailing up a river with Humphrey Bogart and Katie Hepburn . . . I have a feeling you are turning into a goddam myth somehow.”43 This choice of words was apt. As Roots received more attention through the 1970s, Haley and his family story took on mythic qualities. By tracing his family’s history back to eighteenth-century Gambia, Haley seemed to have accomplished the impossible. In doing so he came to embody new possibilities for black history and new potentials for thinking about the place of individuals and families in history. These mythic qualities made it possible for Roots to challenge earlier historical myths, like Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, but they also put immense pressure on Haley.
Haley received over four thousand letters in response to the New York Times Magazine article. “I was fascinated with the story in the New York Times Magazine about your root tracing,” one reader wrote. “As a young black adult I would really like to delve into my own family heritage. I have knowledge to go on collected from elderly aunts and uncles. This past year at school I sent for information from the census bureau to verify my family tree, but became discouraged when I remembered I came from slaves. This is why I was so excited after reading your article. It was quite moving.”44 An older white reader from New Haven wrote, “I can now understand why Black students at colleges are demanding courses in colleges in Black Studies; they should be proud of their ancestry and their background.”45 “I’ve still got tears in my eyes,” another reader told Haley.46 Many readers said they were eager to read more of Haley’s book. “I just finished reading your delightful article ‘The African’ in to-day’s New York Sunday Times,” a reader wrote. “How I would like to have read another two hundred pages of this colossal narrative.”47
Haley also appeared on several television shows, including two appearances on the David Frost Show, which broadcast on Westinghouse Corporation “Group W” stations across the country. On the second visit, Haley presented Frost with a detailed report on the host’s genealogy, a gesture Haley repeated for Johnny Carson in 1977 when he appeared on the Tonight Show. These appearances also generated positive responses from viewers. “Alex Haley is just terrific,” wrote a viewer from Tucson, Arizona. “What a story teller and what marvelous history of his family tree. I could have listened to him all afternoon.”48 “I can’t really tell you how thrilled I was with . . . the story of your search,” a woman from New York wrote. “Thrilled to the point of tears, joyous tears. . . . Even thinking about it now I find myself filling up. What you have been able to do has been the dream of so many of us that know we have our roots in Africa.”49 “I’m watching your guest talk about his ancestry Roots in Africa,” another viewer wrote to David Frost. “I’ve been here at my breakfast table absolutely glued to my chair. It is by far one of the most exciting interesting things I’ve heard on TV in a long long time.”50 Another viewer was fascinated by Haley’s story even if he could not remember the author’s name. “I am very interested in getting the name and mailing address of the gentleman you had last Tuesday,” this viewer wrote to Frost. “He is the Black man who was able to trace his history back to Africa. Being Black myself I was very interested in his quest and eventual success.”51 Haley replied to a surprising number of these letters. “I appreciate your letter forwarded by the David Frost Show,” Haley wrote to one viewer. “The great number of people who responded really build my motivation for finishing the long, tough job of writing the book.”52
Haley found black audiences especially excited about his research. “Each time I have seen you on TV . . . and all throughout my five readings of the Times feature, I have wept unashamedly,” a woman from New York wrote. “One can just imagine what the actual experience must have done to and for you. You have made so many of us proud of not only you but of ourselves and most certainly of our forefathers about whom we knew so little until you. What can we ever do to repay you—or even just to say God Bless you and Thanks.”53 A professor at Albany State University, a historically black institution in Georgia, wrote to tell Haley that he was assigning Haley’s New York Times article in his class and asked Haley to keep the history departments at black colleges apprised of his progress on Roots.54 A librarian at the National Portrait Gallery expressed admiration for Haley’s research but wondered if Roots would ever be published. “Of course we Black sisters and brothers feel like gathering up our little stories and tracing ourselves the way you did,” she wrote, “but it is taking you so long to get that book out I am beginning to think it is a fairy tale.”55 After visiting the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Haley wrote to Charles Anderson, a former Tuskegee airman and a professor of African American studies, “Every time I have a new chance to share the adventure that is to become a book the response of those who hear it thrills me all over again.”56 He also wrote to sociologist Harry Edwards at University of California, Berkeley, to thank him for a warm welcome in the Bay Area. “One of these fine days [my book] will be out there on the stands,” Haley wrote, “and I am working hard as I know how to make it a book which genuinely will make a positive difference in both black and white audiences concerning what really is the richness and beauty of Blackness!”57
As Haley and Roots garnered increasing publicity through the early 1970s, Haley’s relationship to black scholars and cultural institutions grew more complicated. “We used to sit in the history department at Howard and wonder when the book was coming out because he was still doing the speech,” musician and scholar Bernice Reagon recalled. “And we would hear stories so we thought it was going to be a history book, an academic book. I remember when the word started going around that it wasn’t going to be a story of his research, it was going to be a reconstructed story and I can remember the disappointment. Because we wanted a book of his research, and we were very disappointed that that was not going to happen.”58 With the buzz generated by Roots, Haley received offers from publishers to write books on black history, African history, and black genealogy, areas in which he had no academic training. Simon and Schuster, for example, offered Haley a $5,000 advance to write a history of Africa in 1967, just months after Haley had made his first trip to the continent.59 After a Carnegie Corporation executive heard Haley’s lecture, the author was invited to the Carnegie office in New York. “All the executives were assembled,” Haley wrote. “Told them the story. They proposed to me that I head up bringing into being a Black Genealogical Library!”60 Haley’s rising stature as an expert
on black history opened many doors for him, but it was disconcerting to many professionals in the field. When Haley received the Carnegie grant to start a black genealogical project, for example, it strained his relationship with the Schomburg library, a black culture center in Harlem where George Sims and Haley had gathered research materials for Roots. “If I sound emotional in regards to your relationship with the Schomburg, it is only because I long for the kind of support which you are able to obtain for your new project to be available to the Schomburg,” library chief Jean Blackwell Hutson wrote to Haley. “Your name has come up so often during this period because nearly every white person to whom we have appealed for support have [sic] said, ‘Where are some prominent Black people who have used the Collection and who know its value,’ and since you are in the news so much these days, it has often been asked, ‘Why isn’t Haley helping you,’ and of course, all I can say is, ‘He is busy doing his own thing.’”61 This rift remained after Roots was published to acclaim. “I have been disappointed not to find Schomburg included in the promotion of ‘Roots,’” Blackwell Hutson wrote to Haley in 1977. “You were so very enthusiastic about helping Schomburg in the early days of your research.” Blackwell Hutson described the library as being “in a very bad state so far as acquisitions are concerned” and asked Haley to donate a 16 mm copy of Roots because the $5,400 cost to purchase the film was prohibitive.62 As Haley became a national focal point for black history, his success seemed to come at the expense of cultural institutions like the Schomburg that had made his research possible.
Making Roots Page 7