Haley fit somewhat awkwardly with the intellectual and political directions of black studies in this era. The demand for Haley as a speaker on college campuses had much to do the Black Power movement and the associated growth of black studies programs in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Students demanded more black speakers, and Haley had established himself as one of the top lecturers in the country. Haley shared many affinities with students and faculty who developed black studies; he believed in affirming black culture, appreciating black history, and fostering black pride. But he also believed that all of these should be pursued with the least possible conflict or confrontation. He was, after all, a writer who had pitched an idea for a book called How to Co-exist with Negroes, and the sensibilities of white audiences always figured prominently in his thinking. This made him the rare speaker who could appeal to both black students and white administrators.
Haley also did not make any attempt to situate himself in the tradition of black artists and intellectuals who had looked to Africa or written about slavery before Roots. If Haley read Carter G. Woodson, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Pauli Murray, Richard Wright, or Waters Turpin, he very seldom mentioned these or other black writers to his lecture audiences or correspondents. C. Eric Lincoln, a longtime friend of Haley’s and one of his most prominent academic backers, recalled that when the eminent black historian John Hope Franklin asked to meet Haley, Haley replied “John Hope who?” Around black academics, Lincoln recalled, Haley “often belittled himself and stayed out of their way and so on because he was so sensitive to the fact that he was not a college graduate.”63 Haley described his work as a professional writer in terms of academic credentials. He was elated when his father told him he considered the publication of The Autobiography of Malcolm X as the “equivalent to getting your Ph.D.,” and after anthropologist Jan Vansina praised Haley’s work in the Gambia Haley said, “I felt as if he had passed me as a Doctoral Candidate.”64
Being outside academia made it possible for Haley to see Roots as something wholly unprecedented. This is the “first really collated, organized, documented and (most importantly) humanized Black History!” Haley wrote to his Reader’s Digest editor when he sent the chapter of his book. Haley described how his lectures had taken him into the “‘lion’s dens’ of black militancy: Cornell, San Francisco State, San Jose State,” where “I am not generally championed at all, as an individual.” “I have gone into these places, where people are clamoring about ‘Black History,’” Haley continued, “and up there on the stages I have gone into really but smatterings, but sketches, of what this book is to have between its covers. And I have had the pleasure that I have not known one single instance when, at the end, there was not quite literally an ovation, generally a standing one. I do not feel this for me, but for the material I have been able to gather, giving us all new insight into Black History, documented, humanized!”65 Haley, of course, did not write the first black history. Carter G. Woodson founded the Association for the Study of African American Life and History in 1915 and popularized Negro History Week (later Black History Month) in 1926. John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (1947) was already decades old when Haley started lecturing on his search for roots. Novelist Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (1966), a story of a slave family in the Civil War era based on stories she had heard from her grandmother, brought black family history to popular audiences (Walker later accused Haley of copyright infringement, but a judge dismissed the case). African histories and cultures were also more familiar to many black Americans than Haley supposed. Among other works, black readers enjoyed Eslanda Goode Robeson’s African Journey (1945) and Ebony editor Era Bell Thompson’s Africa: Land of Fathers (1954) years before Roots was published. Haley’s unique contribution was to bring his historical fiction to the mass market, first through lectures and later through the book and television miniseries versions of Roots. While Haley did not write the first black history, he made black history available to more people and interesting to more people than anyone had before.
The increased attention Roots garnered in the early 1970s was both flattering and daunting for Haley. His busy lecture schedule generated lots of interest in his family saga but left him with little writing time. Every lecture sold more readers on a book he was in danger of never finishing. Many of the admirers who wrote to Haley asked after the publication date of his book, which he had promised to finish every year since 1964. “I feel almost guilty about the time the book is taking, as so many people express, as you do, deep and genuine anticipation of it,” Haley wrote to a librarian in Los Angeles. “But it hopes to be a book to realize its promise and that demands this unusual long exacting care in the writing.”66 Haley saw the avalanche of letters piled on his desk after the New York Times Magazine article as “another barometer as to the reception awaiting the book. . . . I am certain that other authors have been as pressured as I feel know—to finish, but I don’t know if many have had as much advance receptivity for the book yet in the typewriter. It’s kind of a deep responsibility feeling.”67
Before Haley had completed a full draft of Roots he had given over one hundred paid lectures on his family research, sold the rights to the hardcover and paperback editions of the book, contracted to condense his story for Reader’s Digest, and sold the film rights twice, first to Columbia Pictures and later to David Wolper. It is difficult to think of any work in progress that was so commercially successful and eagerly anticipated, much less one by a black author.
Why did so many people want to hear Haley’s story? In 1969, Haley tried to answer this question for a local newspaper in Utica, New York. “Essentially what motivates this steadily-mounting pre-publication interest in my book simply is that it will offer a ground-breaking saga of Black History and Black Heritage, in which, now, there is an intense international interest,” Haley wrote. “Black history or heritage held virtually no interest for whites, and woefully little interest for blacks until quite recent times. But the last twenty years, say, have seen us all become acutely racially sensitized. Today, a sharply increased awareness of black history and black heritage have [sic] come to be recognized as a vital primary requisite if we are to ameliorate the racial problem which qualifies easily today as America’s greatest domestic crisis.”68
If Haley benefited from a growing interest in black history, his storytelling abilities made this history something that audiences could feel intimately. Author Frank Chin captured this best in describing Haley as a “medium” whose voice allowed people to touch the past. “You’ve aroused a kind of unsuspected madness in all the people I watched listen to you,” Chin told Haley. “Yours is a story people want to possess personally and cherish in secret to enlarge with their own lives. . . . Your story all but arouses superstition in your listeners, a certain fright a gentle terror of bringing the past, the voices of grandmothers we’ve somehow betrayed in our failing memory, rooms we’ve abandoned and are afraid to enter again because they’ve grown dark and some hostile to us . . . and you seem to come from those places.” Chin described how Haley had an uncanny ability to make each person in a large lecture audience feel personally invested in his story. “It’s amazing how after you’ve gone everyone becomes private,” Chin wrote, “as if they’ve just seen a loved one die and how, for a few moments, everyone is both excited and little irritable, unwilling to let you out of them. Everyone, in his own way feels an expert on what they’ve heard, if not in terms of the facts, then in terms of feelings, and is unwilling to corrupt or pollute their understanding, their personal experience of your story with anyone else’s.”69 Haley had a remarkable ability to speak to a large audience and have each person come away feeling as if he was talking to them individually.
These haunting qualities of Haley’s lectures are not immediately evident in Roots. The characters in the book and the television miniseries are tasked primarily with surviving and advancing the family story from Kunta Kinte in the 1760s to Alex Haley in t
he 1970s. Neither Haley nor the television screenwriters allowed the characters much space for thoughts, dreams, feelings, or fears that did not fit this steady historical trajectory. In his lectures, Haley told his story in flashbacks, moving between his research in the 1960s and 1970s and his ancestors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He relayed memories of hearing his family elders talk on the front porch and these voices intertwined with his own recollections of traveling to the Gambia and various research archives. While Haley always expressed more curiosity about his characters’ actions than their feelings, his lectures presented his own feelings—as a writer, researcher, family member, and black American—vividly. Readers and television audiences described reading and watching Roots in visceral terms, whereas lecture audiences more often described hearing Haley speak in affective terms. The haunting qualities Chin identified in Haley’s lectures were largely excised when the book and television series became chronological narratives that emphasized the characters’ march through history rather than Haley’s reflections on what this history meant.
Haley’s lectures, even more than the book or the television versions of Roots, made audiences feel personally invested in his research for his family’s history. Critics who obsessed over which parts of Haley’s story were true and which parts were fabricated misunderstood what made the work a cultural phenomenon. People were drawn to Haley’s story because it was compelling and persuasive, not because every part of the story was factually accurate. By speaking about Roots, Haley encouraged people to see history and themselves in new ways.
Gil Noble, for example, interviewed Haley in 1972 on Like it Is, a black public affairs television program that broadcast in New York City. “Filming my jazz doc took me to Jamaica to examine the genesis of African music there, into today’s Calypso music,” Noble wrote to Haley after the broadcast. “It turned out to be an emotional trip for me, because I went for the 1st time to . . . a small town, where my father was born. I saw the house in which he was raised . . . the same house where his father was raised . . . and back even, to my great-grandfather. . . . I met people who knew my family (hardly any are left) and they told me a lot about my blood line, that I didn’t know.” Like millions of other listeners, readers, and viewers, Haley’s story made Noble see his own family’s history with new eyes. “I think you should know, that our short meeting and interview played a large role in my behavior in Jamaica . . . the 1st step of my African bloodline. Again, thank you.”70
CHAPTER FOUR
Writing Roots
“I’m so much anticipating when I can afford to quit the regular lecturing circuit, which eats up time I’d far rather spend writing,” Alex Haley wrote to a Reader’s Digest editor at the end of 1973. “It’s not that the lectures are without regard, though: by now, I have spoken of this book to more than 1.5 million people in live audience, who are out there awaiting it.”1 Each day brought more mail from people eager to buy and read Roots, but Alex Haley still had to write the book.
Haley had established the basic story line for his family saga by the summer of 1969. He mailed the first chapter to his editor at Reader’s Digest and felt compelled to explain why a single chapter ran over two hundred pages. “I have not had it in me to leave out a single item that all the years of research turned up of what, truly, was the African culture of the mid-1700s,” Haley wrote. “You will see, clinically, the immense problem I faced. It could not be, all of this, in any way simply some rhetorical listing of items of that culture. That would be a book for students, scholars. People, by the many millions, need to know, almost by an osmosis, this culture.” Haley’s job, as he understood it, was “to weave [this] culture about the growing-up of the boy, Kunta Kinte. The chapter opens with his being born. It will end when he is a young man of about 16.”2 Haley later described the structure of Roots’s first section as echoing The Autobiography of Malcolm X. “I did not editorialize,” Haley said of the Malcolm X book, “but simply started with the subject as a child—as a fetus, actually—and related, in a very low-key way, successively, what happened to him, from childhood to adulthood. And I used that same technique with Kunta Kinte. It taught me to let the readers write their own editorial; I don’t do it for them.”3
Haley explained that the book’s vision of Kunta Kinte’s childhood as a free person was “the tree’s trunk.” Once readers identified with Kunta as a child, the horrors of his enslavement would be more vivid. “Everything that subsequently happens in the book derives at least part of its emotional power out of the reader’s knowing, for themselves, in an impact way, the delineated life and culture in which that infant, boy, young man Kunta Kinte grew up in Juffure Village, Gambia, West Africa,” Haley wrote. “Having grown up with this boy there, then when he goes into that stinking, fetid slaveship hold, in chains, in pains, the readers are going to experience that hold with him.” Haley had an abiding faith in the power of words to convey feelings, and he did not distinguish between the types of sentiments Roots might engender. Haley invited readers to empathize with Kunta as a child so that, chapters later, they would be more deeply traumatized by Kunta’s enslavement. “When on [Kunta’s] fourth escape his foot is cut in half (across the arch) for punishment, I am going to make a reader’s foot hurt,” Haley wrote. Haley said, “The foot-cutting is going to be three paragraphs I want no one ever to forget,” and he conducted specific research to make this scene of brutality come alive for readers. “I have been . . . to a physicist,” Haley wrote, “I have in cold abstract physics terms what happens when a six-foot man raises an axe with a three-foot handle and a four-pound head, and pulls it suddenly down toward a target—I have it in terms of foot-pounds, velocity, things like that . . . I have a surgeon’s cold, clinical description of every single successive thing that axe’s blade severs, epidermis through sole.” Haley concluded by promising, “I have worked, Tony. Ain’t nobody—nobody, nobody, nobody, who reads it going to be unaffected by this book.”4
Haley wrote and revised chapters of Roots regularly from 1967 to 1975. He preferred to start writing after dinner: “All the effort to massage a synthesis of my research into myself is planned for the late night moments when it flows out of me from as close to my subconscious as I can free myself to give.”5 Often, Haley would speak into a dictation machine from which a typist would later prepare a chapter draft. Haley liked to write and revise while he traveled, and he described working on planes “as if they were my office.”6 In handwritten jottings Haley marked time in the many months he worked on Roots:
July 20, 1969: Earlier this afternoon, man landed on the moon. Listened to broadcast in dining car of train California Zephyr.
August 20, 1973: Dad died this morning, 82. Finally he is back with mama, the wife he loved.
October 3, 1973: 5:15 a.m.—wow! Must get some sleep; must catch 8 a.m. flight to enter lecture tour.
October 4, 1973: Braniff #237 from St. Paul/Minneapolis to Kansas City. After lecture last night, slept 11 hours; needed! Feel great!!
August 11, 1975: Happy birthday to me! 54! Wow! Where’d those years go?7
Epochal events, personal moments, and quotidian details ran together amid the sea of manuscript pages that threatened to engulf him. Haley preferred goldenrod paper and green felt pens (which he described as his “two major fetishes”), and many of the thousands of archived pages of his drafts are so marked up that they practically bleed green ink.8 It took Haley a long time to finish Roots, but it was not for a lack of effort. He wrote, revised, and wrangled his prose for years to create his family history.
While it is clear that Roots is Haley’s story, it is equally clear that the book would not have been finished without the assistance of his friend and editor Murray Fisher, the pressure applied by Doubleday, or the financial incentive of the television deal with David Wolper and ABC. Haley had a vision for how “Kunta Kinte’s descendants [would] fall into the 260-year pageantry” of American history, but he needed help to turn this vision into Roots.9 “Murray Fishe
r had been my editor for years at Playboy magazine when I solicited his clinical expertise to help me structure this book from a seeming impassable maze of researched materials,” Haley wrote in the acknowledgments to Roots. “After we had established Roots’ pattern of chapters, next the story line was developed, which he then shepherded throughout. Finally, in the book’s pressurized completion phase, he even drafted some of Roots’ scenes, and his brilliant editing pen steadily tightened the book’s great length.”10 The six years of work between Haley and Fisher that preceded these three sentences were productive and at time contentious. This relationship between author and editor reveals a great deal about the pressure Haley faced as he wrote Roots.
Murray Fisher was twelve years younger than Haley and came to their relationship with more worldly experience. Fisher grew up in Asia—first in China, where his parents were American missionaries, and then in Tokyo, Japan, where his father was assigned for Reader’s Digest. Fisher worked as a war correspondent in South Korea and for NBC before being hired by Hugh Hefner at Playboy. At Playboy’s office in Chicago, Fisher developed and edited the monthly celebrity interview feature, which debuted in 1962 with Haley’s interview of Miles Davis. Fisher helped edit The Autobiography of Malcolm X and left Playboy in 1974 to work full time with Haley on finishing Roots.11 After working together closely for several years, Haley told Fisher that their relationship was evidence that “friendships can thrive between sharply diverse personalities.” “You’re brilliant, mercurial, cosmopolitan; you decide/act almost by reflex,” Haley said. “I’m really deeply of Henning: slower, methodic, pray nightly; innately I listen, observe, saying nothing until I can sufficiently playback, mull over, finally decide. This pattern, in fact, is why Roots exists—one decade of this pattern. . . . I despise any unnecessary confrontations—as I think most are; I’ve engaged in two angry, shouting confrontations, the last in 1947.”12
Making Roots Page 8