Alex Haley

by Robert J. Norrell

  The Mendota patrolled the coast from New Jersey to North Carolina. The crew constantly performed drills—collision, fire, man-overboard maneuvers. But it was not all work: seamen played chess and pinochle and watched movies many nights. The greatest excitement of Palmer’s time in the Coast Guard was the rescue of German sailors whose cargo ship had broken up near Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. The Mendota recovered the bodies of several dead seamen.2

  Palmer liked the military. “I was on my own,” he said later, which did “a great deal for my self-image.” In the Coast Guard, there were still people telling him what to do, but it was not like being ordered around at home. He was thrilled to awaken at sea and stand at the rail, looking at the ocean. He liked the smells of paint and steam and of coffee. He enjoyed talking with his shipmates. In recognition of his new condition, he began to identify himself as Alex Haley.

  In Norfolk, where there were thousands of sailors, Haley joined the shore liberty forays of older mess boys and stewards. Prostitutes captured his attention in the black area of Norfolk known as “Trick Street.” Women were “the number one objective of almost every red-blooded sailor that I ever knew.” Haley had his first sexual encounter when he and a buddy got drunk, and the friend took him to a prostitute called Chow-Chow, telling her, “My friend here wants a piece-a-ass.” Haley followed her upstairs as Ella Fitzgerald sang “A Tisket, A Tasket” on the jukebox.3

  One fellow seaman remembered that Haley was different from the other mess boys, more educated and able to converse with white officers.4 That ability was both a blessing and a burden for him. Lieutenant Junior Grade Murray Day, from South Carolina, noted Haley’s intelligence and college training and ordered him to do the work for Day’s college correspondence courses. Day was pleased when Haley won him high grades, but when he got a C in a meteorology course, Day became enraged at Haley and cursed him. Haley responded that Day was a “stupid son-of-a-bitch.” At the point of blows, they both pulled back. Haley left the confrontation expecting to get court-martialed, but when the two were summoned to meet with the captain, Day said to forget it. He did not want the story to get out about a black sailor doing his work for him.5

  When Haley developed a pen-pal relationship with a young white woman, he made the mistake of showing her picture to his mates. News of his white female friend got around the base, and he was transferred out of Norfolk to Beaufort, North Carolina, and assigned to the USCG Pamlico, an old cutter that patrolled the North Carolina coastline. In Beaufort he advanced from mess boy to mess attendant first class, got an increase in pay, and cooked for a small group in the officers’ mess. Isaiah “Pop” Robinson, a veteran Coast Guard cook, taught him to stew meat and crumble egg yolks and parsley into the mix for appearance’s sake. Officers thought they were gourmets, Pop advised; they ate with their eyes, whereas enlisted sailors ate with their bellies. Haley was helping Pop clean up the galley after lunch on the first Sunday in December 1941 when a sailor rushed in and blurted: “The radio says the Japs just bombed the hell out of us—somewhere called Pearl Harbor!” The next day Haley knew the world had changed: the crew had to rescue a Filipino shipmate from a group of red-faced, cursing white boys who were chasing him up the gangplank shouting, “Jap! Jap! Jap!”6

  Just as the war broke out, Haley was driving around Beaufort and spotted a beautiful, light-complected young girl on the street. “She had a doe look about her,” Haley recalled. “She was young and lovely and shy.” He did not introduce himself then, but afterward he searched for her and finally found Nannie Branche at a dance. “Her voice was soft, with a gentle accent,” Haley recalled. He pursued Nan vigorously, meeting her at a joint called The Quick Lunch, where one could get a baloney sandwich and a Pepsi for a nickel each and then play the jukebox for the same price. As the necessities of war pressed on the couple, “we were in such a state of love that the very idea of leaving her appalled me . . . and it was mutual.” They were dancing to “Stardust” one night in early 1942 when Haley asked Nan to marry him. “Sure,” she answered. It was, Haley recalled, “a kind of marrying time for military people.”

  But before they married, he took her to Henning to meet his family. By 1942, Simon had moved to Arkansas A&M in Pine Bluff, but Zeona had left him there to teach at LeMoyne College in Memphis, and after that they lived apart. When she met Nan, Zeona took the opportunity to warn her that marrying Alex would be the worst mistake she ever made. Nonetheless, the two got married in North Carolina, with Haley using his last four dollars to pay the minister. They lived together long enough for Nan to become pregnant with their first child, Lydia, born in 1943. Alex Haley had gotten married at age twenty without much sense of marital responsibility, without much experience when it came to women, and probably without a good example of a successful marriage to guide his behavior. He could not remember much about his grandparents’ loving marriage. His parents’ union had seen difficult circumstances, with Bertha’s bad health and Simon’s frequent moves. Simon’s marital relations with Zeona were marked by acrimony; she freely expressed her distaste for Simon to Nannie Branche.7

  In September 1941, in anticipation of war, Coast Guard personnel were put under the naval command. Not long afterward, when the United States entered the war, Haley was shipped to California, and in 1943 he was assigned to a supply ship, the Murzim, which carried shells and ammunition to the South Pacific. The crew of 250 was white except for eight blacks and eight Filipinos in the mess. The Murzim left San Francisco in July 1943 and arrived a month later at the island of New Caledonia, off the eastern coast of Australia. Haley was aboard the ship for eighteen months as it ferried supplies to Australia, New Zealand, New Hebrides, the Fiji Islands, the Solomon Islands, New Guinea, and the Philippines.

  It was hazardous duty, though men on the Murzim thought little of it, Haley later said, after the first days at sea, when every whitecap sent tremors of fear about Japanese submarines. The crew was forced at one point to abandon the ship when a fire broke out on board and threatened to result in a catastrophic explosion. Indeed, that happened on the Murzim’s sister cargo ship, the Mount Hood, whose explosion in 1944 killed nearly the whole crew. Haley’s big problem during the long nights at sea was not fear but loneliness and boredom. He had made the fateful decision to take a portable typewriter on his Pacific service, and he got into the nightly habit of writing letters to family, schoolmates, and even to teachers. “It wasn’t uncommon at every mail call for me to receive maybe 30 or 40 letters,” he recalled. Shipmates took notice.

  Haley’s boss on the Murzim was Steward First Class Percival L. Scott, a black, twenty-five-year veteran of the Coast Guard, a man whose height and breadth dwarfed Alex’s. Their relationship was tense at first. Haley said that Scott was “a hostile old sea dog from the day I entered his galley.” Scott once looked down at Haley with a smirk and said in his growling bass voice: “Us bein’ the same race ain’t gon’ get you by. Damn civilians done ruint the service.” Haley saw a letter that Scott wrote to his wife: “Haley he the steward second-class, supposed to be my assistant. Ben to college and can tiperite but schur is stooped. Can’t boil water.”

  At first Haley’s nighttime typing in the pantry annoyed Scott. But “after haranguing me all day,” Haley later said, Scott “was irresistibly lured to watch me ‘tiperite.’ I’d make the portable rattle, certain it angered him that a subordinate had a skill he hadn’t.” But after a time, it emerged that Scott had thought of how he might deploy Haley’s skill. “Looker here, boy, you ever seen the Cap’n talk letters to his yeoman?” The yeoman took shorthand, but Scotty thought that was unnecessary. “Fast as you run that thing, you might make a yeoman. I’ll help you practice; I’ll talk you some letters.” Haley’s initial response was dismissive, since “the idea of this ungrammatical clown hijacking my offtime to dictate to me was hilarious.” Scott replied: “You’re real wise, ain’t you?” The next day Scott ran Haley ragged with orders to shine steam kettles and sc
rub garbage cans. Haley realized that he could resist Scott further and perhaps end up in the brig, or he could type Scott’s letters. “You got the message?” Scott asked, to which a still-angry but conflict-shy Haley nodded. “You a smart boy.”8

  That night Scott followed Haley to the pantry. Scott’s first letter was to an old colleague on another ship. “I typed one garbled, ungrammatical cliché after another,” Haley recalled, and then Scott signed it as though “it were the Emancipation Proclamation.” The next morning Scott assembled five mess boys, telling them, “Never forget, Haley give order, it’s the same as me!” From then on, Haley was free of drudgery in the mess, and every night he typed letters. Eventually, Scott arranged for Haley to spend time on the bridge of the ship, where he learned to read flags and blinker lights, thus gathering war news that he reported to Scott. Then Scott would “predict” the next big happening in the war.

  Scott had appointed himself officer in charge of sailors’ morale. His gruff demeanor belied a tender concern about the happiness of all the men, black and white, on the Murzim. He got angry when a young seaman received a “Dear John” letter from a girl back home. One night he brought an upset sailor to Haley and demanded that Haley read the break-up letter. “I’m goin’ to set her straight,” Scott told Haley, and he began dictating a letter to the miscreant girl. “Here I set on a ship full of 500-pound bombs in a ocean full of subs and sharks. You don’t even wait to see if I get back. I bet you grabbed some disanimated 4-F. It ought to be him out here doin’ your fightin’ and dyin’.” A mortified Haley typed it all, and it would not be the last time Scott’s tongue and Haley’s typewriter lashed an unfaithful woman. At the next port of call, recipients of break-up letters began to get missives of repentance and pleas for forgiveness.

  With Scott’s sponsorship, Haley began writing and publishing the ship’s newspaper, the Seafarer, a mimeographed sheet of news, human interest stories, and jokes. He wrote an admiring description of the work of the Seabees, the naval construction force: “Born of thousands of veterans of hundred-odd industrial trades that would net them top-flight salaries in civilian life today, the Seabees who volunteered in silent aid of their country’s cause have proven their worth time and time again under conditions that, to say the least, are too often unpleasant. . . . Murzimites know them best for their cargo handling techniques, at that, they’re superb.”9

  Scott watched the Murzim’s irregular mail calls carefully. He knew when a sailor had lost a girlfriend or was being neglected by his family. He pointed out two crewmen to Haley. “Poor guys don’t never get no mail.” Scott ordered Haley to get the neglected sailors listed in pen-pal ads. These crewmen suddenly began to get letters. In the Seafarer, Haley wrote a poignant article titled “Mail Call,” which he intended not just for the crew but also for folks back home. The story’s scene was set with the ship’s loudspeaker booming for sailors to come to the number three hatch. Haley recounted the chatter on the stairwells up to the deck:

  Geez, I sure hope I hear from Mom today . . .

  I wanna hear from Jean.

  I didn’t get any mail the last two calls . . .

  I just wanna hear from somebody, that’s all.

  When the mail sacks were opened, names were called. “Jones . . . Barker . . . Taylor.” Men pressed forward toward the caller. Then Haley shifted his lens to the outer limits of the group, where men kept their eyes, full of hope, on the caller’s lips, but “always their faces drop after each name.” Everyone knew which sailors usually did not get mail, and when one of them happened to get a letter, a cheer went up. Afterward the lucky ones hung about sharing pictures received from home, but the unlucky left with their heads down. “They manage a brave smile if they see you watching . . . but if you’ll notice, the smile fades quickly and maybe they’ll amble over to the rail and look out over the side, at the sea and the horizon.” They never looked toward land but always out at the ocean—“the direction home is in.” Haley concluded with an admonition: “Now, folks back home, is he someone you should be writing to?” Keep our mail bags full, Haley promised, and “we’ll do the rest.” Many crewmen did, in fact, send “Mail Call” home, and it was reprinted in hundreds of stateside newspapers. For years afterward Haley was identified as the fellow who wrote “Mail Call.”10 Haley’s writing in the Seafarer revealed that he had excellent instincts for public relations. He had a gift for describing a scene and setting a mood. Indeed, his work reflected remarkable skill for an untrained and mostly inexperienced writer.

  In the meantime, Haley was secretly attempting to write magazine articles, mostly romance stories for women’s confession magazines. He wrote from the perspective of a woman treated badly by a man. The stories were rejected, but Scott discovered them and put them to use in a new morale-building mission. He began dictating love letters to women whom crewmen had met in Australia, cribbing passages from Haley’s stories. Soon crewmen began to receive adoring letters. Haley later wrote that after a shore leave in Brisbane, “Scotty’s clients wobbled back, describing fabulous romantic triumphs. . . . Three cheers for the old sea dog rang out regularly. Scotty was fit to split with bliss.”

  Crewmen asked Haley to help them with letters to women at home. Soon there was a line of waiting men each night. For a dollar, he interviewed a sailor, got information about the girl’s eyes and hair, and banged out a letter. If she was a blonde, Haley might write: “Your hair is like the moonlight as it reflects on the rippling waves away [sic] out here where I am only awaiting the next chance to see you.” All the sailor had to do was copy the letter in his own hand and post it. Soon Haley no longer cooked at all. All he did was write love letters and edit the Seafarer. “It was a pleasant and rather startling discovery: that one could make his living doing nothing else but writing.” By the time his tour of duty on the Murzim ended, Haley knew he wanted to be a writer. Many noteworthy Americans emerged from the war with similar intentions. A brief list of war veterans who became successful fiction writers includes Joseph Heller, J. D. Salinger, James Jones, Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, Leon Uris, James Michener, and Gore Vidal. Haley did not often use the war experience as the subject of his writing, but military service made him a writer just the same.

  * * *

  In early 1945, as the war was winding down, Haley decided to re-enlist. Staying in the Coast Guard gave him something to do rather than return to college, as his father wanted. The service had provided him with good opportunities, and it had made significant strides during the war toward fair treatment of black seamen. Haley was posted to the Coast Guard demobilization center in Brooklyn, New York. There he produced Coast Guard publications and handled public relations. In the late 1940s Haley was transferred to the Coast Guard’s district headquarters in Manhattan. He still performed public relations duties, but he also served as steward to Admiral Edward H. Smith, who had founded the International Ice Patrol. “Iceberg” Smith was the most famous officer in the Coast Guard. One day when Haley was serving him coffee, the admiral said, “Haley, I just read an interesting article by a colored fellow.” Haley looked at the article and replied, “Yes, sir, I wrote it.”

  Smith then arranged for the creation of a new Coast Guard rating for journalists. In late 1949, at age twenty-eight but now sporting a thin mustache that made him look a bit older, Haley was made a chief petty officer with the title Chief Journalist of the Coast Guard. That development was good public relations for the Coast Guard: in 1947 President Harry S. Truman had ordered the desegregation of the U.S. armed forces.11 But Haley’s success owed much to his likable manner. “All officers liked Alex,” a black colleague later said, but he was also popular among his fellow blacks, who knew him as an easygoing person and looked at him as a role model.12

  His public relations work brought Haley in touch with influential press people. A New York newspaper reported that “the amiable, industrious and ever helpful Alex Haley” was the one to call “when ther
e’s a ship in distress along the Atlantic coast, a plane down at sea, a fishing party marooned.” In 1950 explosives detonated at South Amboy, New Jersey, during the loading of volatile material from ships onto railroad cars. The Coast Guard had responsibility for the work. The explosion killed thirty people, injured many more, and destroyed $20 million in property. Haley handled the Coast Guard’s press relations during the catastrophe.13

  By then, Alex and Nan lived at 419 West 129th Street in Harlem, in a nice apartment that Haley got by paying money “under the table” to a realtor. The couple’s son, William, known in the family as “Fella,” was born in 1945, joining Lydia, now age two. The family arrived in Harlem in the aftermath of the 1943 riot there, provoked by a policeman’s shooting of a black soldier who intervened when the cop was beating a black woman. A crowd of three thousand formed around the policeman, a rumor spread that the soldier had died, and two days and nights of property destruction ensued. The event so disturbed New Yorkers and riveted local attention that Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin—all residents of Harlem at the time—recorded their observations and feelings about the violence in their writing.14 In the eyes of whites, Harlem had become a kind of no-man’s-land where crime and violence were ever present.15 Many Harlem residents felt a keen alienation from the mainstream of American society. A government survey taken in Harlem in the spring of 1942 had discovered that most black residents believed they would be as well or better off if the Japanese won the war.16 But racial separation and hostility marked all of New York in the 1940s. Whites expected blacks to remain apart in their enclaves in Harlem and Brooklyn, and the few integrated neighborhoods were tense places. In the predominantly white areas of Manhattan, few hotels or restaurants welcomed blacks. On the other hand, the city was home to many black intellectuals and radicals, and it was an environment where discussion of race was continuous—a place where a black writer found rich material.