Alex Haley

by Robert J. Norrell

  Now finally reunited with Alex, Nan expected his attention to focus on her and little Lydia and Fella. But she soon felt that he neglected them, and she found his response to her feelings unsatisfactory. Alex usually avoided conflict with Nan, but during an argument in 1947, she slammed the bathroom door in front of him and he reached in and pulled her out roughly. His feelings for Nan were secondary to his professional ambitions. He came back from the war intent on being a writer. “Every night that the Lord brought I was writing,” he said of that time.17

  Simon still wanted Alex to go to college. “Improve your education” was his constant admonition. Now almost thirty years old, Alex felt his father’s disappointment acutely. He was the black sheep of the family. By this time, his siblings were college graduates, headed to professional careers. “It was unthinkable,” he wrote later, “that his son would not go to college . . . it was in fact a disgrace. Worst of all, the first son.” Simon was “always drumming into me that everybody in the family had struggled to be somebody—and what was I thinking now[?]”18

  Service in the war, pursuit of a second career in New York, and perhaps Simon’s disapproval separated Alex from his southern roots. He was busy and a long way from Henning, and he did not often return there in the 1940s or 1950s. Lydia later said that her father never took her to Henning. In 1949 Alex’s beloved Grandma died, and his memorable Aunt Liz shortly followed her to the graveyard.

  * * *

  As he wrote for Coast Guard publications, Haley also spent the decade between 1944 and 1954 trying to break into writing for national magazines. The 1920s and 1930s had brought the heyday of mass-circulation publications. The most prominent weekly magazines, like the Saturday Evening Post and Time, had circulations of two to three million in the 1950s, and the monthly Reader’s Digest went to ten million addresses at that time. Many middle-class American homes subscribed to three or four magazines, and along with newspapers, they were the main portals to American news, opinion, and popular culture.19 For freelance writers, there were two tiers of magazines to contribute to. At the top were older weeklies that published the leading fiction and nonfiction writers in the country. These included the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Atlantic Monthly, Women’s Home Companion, and Ladies Home Journal; Time, Life, and Look, which were focused on news and were written mostly by full-time staff members; and Reader’s Digest, which was known for its feel-good stories about American life and was unique in that its content was mostly reprinted from other magazines, though it published some original pieces by freelancers. These magazines were well illustrated and printed on glossy paper. Less prestigious were magazines called “pulps” for the rough grade of paper on which they were printed. They included the men’s adventure publications Argosy and True and the women’s romance magazines Love Story, Modern Romance, and True Confessions. The hundreds of pulps published in the 1930s and 1940s relied on freelancers and typically paid them a penny a word.

  Haley’s apprenticeship as a magazine writer was arduous. He had submitted stories to the pulp magazines in his early days in the Coast Guard with little success. At one point he papered a wall with rejection notices, reflecting years of trying. His brightest moment was when he received a postcard from an editor that read simply, “Nice try.” That note was the only encouragement he had received, he said, “but it was all I needed.”20 In 1946 he sold his first story, “They Drive You Crazy,” set in the Coast Guard, for $100 to a Sunday newspaper supplement, This Week. The editors rewrote the story, but Haley got a byline.

  Robert Monroe, his Coast Guard commanding officer, had been a sportswriter in Florida. Haley showed Monroe some of his freelance writing, which Monroe began to edit. “I would give him a page and it would come back with chicken scratches with green ink,” Haley later said. Monroe was the first person to give Haley a sense that writing was “more than slathering a lot of words over a piece of paper.” While he was telling people in the Coast Guard that Haley had real promise, he would say to Alex, “In five years you might learn to write a good sentence.” When Haley shared his many rejection slips, Monroe asked, “What the hell did you expect?” But Haley knew that the gruff exterior covered a kind heart. The two became good friends.

  Haley’s Coast Guard work put him in touch with writers who suggested magazine opportunities. Glenn D. Kittler, a freelance journalist, told him that Coronet, a general-interest, digest-sized monthly that featured stories about and by celebrities, was buying one-page historical vignettes. Starting in 1952 Haley wrote several of these for Coronet and was paid $100 if they ran under his name, $125 if under the name of some celebrity. Since the early 1920s Time magazine had advanced the nation’s preoccupation with personal fame through its cover portraits, and its sister publication, Life, devoted many of its slick, large-format pages to profiles of entertainment, sports, and political figures. Reader’s Digest reprinted articles on celebrities and created a variation on the celebrity theme with its feature “My Most Unforgettable Character.” Editors presumed that Americans viewed society through the lens of the individual profile.

  By 1954 Haley felt that he was making headway. Now he wanted to explore more serious social issues. He was already familiar with the work of Richard Wright, and if he had not yet read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and James Baldwin’s essays, he would do so shortly. Much of the best writing by African Americans was autobiographical, whether fiction or nonfiction. Alex had lived his boyhood immersed in his own family history. If his own story could not match the degradation of Wright’s Mississippi background or the religious tension of Baldwin’s Harlem upbringing or the psychological tortures endured by Ellison’s Invisible Man, Alex had acquired in Henning a rich and original story.

  In 1951 he began to imagine a story he entitled “The Lord and Little David.” He set it near Vicksburg, Mississippi, during the summer of 1926, in a community that was about half white and half black. The plot centered on the relationship between two twelve-year-olds, David, white, and George, black. Haley wrote that “there was no thought of any race ‘problem’” in a community that “ran quite smoothly, all sharing the bond of being poor and living for cotton, both facts as accepted as the seasons.”21 In 1952 he submitted “The Lord and Little David” to the Saturday Evening Post. The Post’s editors thought Haley’s dialogue was good, but they were not sure whether the characters were white or black, nor could they quite follow the plot, which centered on a white church excursion. A while later, Haley sent the manuscript to a “literary consultant,” Maryse Rutledge, who confirmed the Post’s critique. “It runs off in too many directions and is what I would call too busy,” Rutledge said, “confusing to the reader because, although you have sensitive feel of your characters, the story itself seems to get lost.” Haley worked hard on his craft. He took twenty-one pages of notes from Maren Elwood’s widely used instructional guide Characters Make Your Story. And he now embraced autobiographical subjects for his main writing efforts, never to let them go.22

  * * *

  In 1954 race relations in the United States were changing significantly. This was the year of Brown v. Board of Education, in which the U.S. Supreme Court turned American jurisprudence firmly against segregation. The next year the Montgomery bus boycott initiated a direct-action movement against segregation that continued into the mid-1960s. The civil rights movement would create new opportunities for black journalists of Haley’s generation. Carl Rowan, another Tennesseean and a navy veteran, covered the movement for the Minneapolis Tribune and later the Chicago Sun-Times. James Hicks, a veteran of the South Pacific theater, edited the New York Amsterdam News and also covered the trial of Emmett Till’s killers in 1955 and the Little Rock school crisis in 1957. Lerone Bennett, a Mississippi native, edited Ebony and commented extensively on civil rights activism through the 1950s and 1960s. Louis Lomax from Georgia wrote widely about activism and then became the country’s first black television reporter.

 
African American life was covered by John H. Johnson’s three magazines: Negro Digest, first published in 1942; Ebony, begun in 1945; and Jet, launched in 1951. A black version of Life, Ebony focused on black celebrities and on civil rights activities. Jet, a weekly digest-sized newsmagazine in the style of Time and Newsweek, became for many African Americans the authoritative source for news about civil rights protests and the lives of famous African Americans. Johnson believed that his magazines delivered the message that blacks “were going places we had never been before and doing things we’d never done before” and that his publications had a larger social impact: “You have to change images before you can change acts and institutions.”23

  Though he never wrote for Johnson’s publications, Haley in 1954 started to write articles that challenged the negative images white Americans held about African Americans. Appearing first in the Christian Science Monitor and then in Reader’s Digest was his article entitled “The Harlem Nobody Knows.” Haley cast Harlem as a place that defied its reputation as a “sinkhole” of capitalism. He predicated his story on the Cold War assumption that foreigners believed that the largest obstacle to the United States’ influence among “the colored races who comprise two-thirds of the world’s population is discrimination against the American Negro, seemingly typified by this over-crowded, dilapidated area.” To counter the image of black degradation in Harlem, Haley emphasized that the area was filled with businesses run by blacks who had overcome the problems caused by the Great Depression and the 1943 riot. “What we need is a crusade of public relations,” one man told Haley. “Harlem’s biggest trouble now is that in too many minds the Negro remains a stereotype.”

  In 1955 Haley published a piece in Atlantic Monthly recalling his Aunt Liz. The story is a slice of life with a building plot—the expectation in Henning that the proud and independent Elizabeth Murray had a lot of money and would contribute it to some community cause. Haley displayed a talent for description, as in the case of a service at the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church: “Both the Senior and Junior Choirs sang with inspiration. Then the preacher gave the devil such a beating round the stump that Brother Dandridge’s wooden leg was going fortissimo in general bedlam, Sister Scrap Scott shrieked three times in high C and fainted right in the choir stand, and Brother Rich Harrell leaped clear over the rostrum railing to kiss the preacher’s hand.” Haley wrote in Negro dialect, even though its use was then being condemned for pandering to white racism. He thus took an idiom used to mock black people and made it one that celebrated them. Haley believed it brought authenticity to his writing.

  Haley’s publishing success undermined the popularity of the man known in the Coast Guard as “the cook who writes.” Some officers insisted that “no man can serve two masters,” and Haley sought a transfer. He was dispatched to Coast Guard headquarters in San Francisco. Though it meant leaving the center of American publishing, Haley was relieved to get away from New York. “You can’t be around people who are perceiving you negatively for too long.”

  Haley was excited about the journey across the country at a time when such trips were glamorized as the modern American family’s ideal excursion. But his years in New York had insulated him from the indignities of the race segregation that still existed. The Haleys’ drive to San Francisco was a journey through the humiliations that remained for African Americans in the mid-1950s. They faced constant denial of rooms at motels that displayed “Vacancy” signs. Haley began wearing his Coast Guard uniform to try to get better treatment. At times, the family simply slept in the car on the side of the road.

  * * *

  In 1955 Haley assumed his duties as press officer for the Coast Guard’s Twelfth District, covering activities from California to Alaska to Honolulu. The office was located on Sansome Street in San Francisco, only a few blocks from the Embarcadero, Chinatown, and the North Beach entertainment and arts district. The Coast Guard provided integrated housing for him and his family in the Presidio, the old military barracks, also on the north shore near the Golden Gate Bridge. He performed the same public relations duties there as in New York, and his boss, John B. Mahan, recalled that Haley was the perfect public relations professional, skilled at every task.24 In October 1956 a Pan-Am flight attempting to circumnavigate the globe ditched in the Pacific, its passengers and crew rescued by the Coast Guard. By the time the survivors were brought to San Francisco, the crash and rescue had become the subject of intense media attention, which Haley managed masterfully, dealing with Life magazine and the Art Linkletter television show.25

  San Francisco then offered a more open racial environment, one far more relaxed than New York. It was a “be yourself, do your thing town,” Haley later said admiringly. The city had become home to the “Beats,” the movement of avant-garde poets and writers led by Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac in the 1950s. They were keenly interested in ethnic cultures, especially those of Asians and blacks, more than in the mainstream traditions that had until then dominated American letters. The Beats lived public lives in the coffee shops, nightclubs, and bookstores of San Francisco’s North Beach.

  Early in Haley’s time there, a group of Coast Guard public relations men went to Enrico Banducci’s famous outdoor café, the Hungry i in North Beach, and one of Haley’s colleagues recognized Barnaby Conrad seated nearby. A writer and San Francisco celebrity, Conrad had published Matador (1952), a fictionalized biography of Spain’s most famous bullfighter. After Matador sold three million copies, Conrad wrote other books and articles for Collier’s, Reader’s Digest, Look, and Saturday Review. In 1953 he had opened a nightclub in the Barbary Coast section of North Beach called El Matador, which immediately became the place to be seen in San Francisco. Unprompted, Haley’s colleague approached Conrad and said that the author needed to meet a fellow writer named Alex Haley. Conrad draped his arm around Alex’s shoulder and insisted that he come to El Matador. Haley went there often and saw many famous actors and musicians, but the celebrities who made the greatest impression were the writers. John Steinbeck, Truman Capote, William Saroyan, and Budd Schulberg came through. Conrad made a special effort to have Haley spend time with Schulberg, who became Alex’s lifelong friend. Haley later said that Conrad was no “liberal,” meaning that he treated him as he did other friends, without the false warmth that some whites showed blacks to display a progressive attitude. Conrad had taught writing, knew the writing market, and edited Alex’s work. He later said Haley was “a good storyteller, worked hard at writing every day, read everything about writing and never gave up.” Haley spent hours chatting with other writers. “It was the first time I had been in a community of selling writers.”26

  The celebrities most appreciated at El Matador were raconteurs, and Conrad was an accomplished storyteller. Haley had grown up amid good storytellers, and now his appreciation of the art was reinforced. Conrad was also a model for how to act as a celebrity and how to behave toward them. A friend wrote that Conrad made it “his business and pleasure to chat up the celebrity at hand,” and soon they went “off into the night, arm in arm, to begin a lifelong friendship.” The same could be said of Alex Haley. One of the keys to Haley’s success as a writer and celebrity in his own right was his affability. He was pleasant company, quick to offer an entertaining yarn. He was comfortable with whites at a time when blacks and whites had relatively few interactions.

  But home life was a different matter. Nan remembered that Alex would come home from work, have dinner, and leave again, saying that he was going to back to his Coast Guard office to work on his writing. He was not always working. His San Francisco friends like Barnaby Conrad knew that Haley saw other women and that he was a self-confessed “womanizer.” Haley’s good friend C. Eric Lincoln later told an interviewer that he and Haley had caroused looking for women during these years. One evening Nan began hemorrhaging, called Haley’s office, and was given a different telephone number to call. The woman who answered called Alex to the phone,
but Nan hung up. Her daughter called an ambulance. In 1958 Nan, Lydia, and Fella—the children were now teenagers—went back to her home in North Carolina for a visit, and once there, Nan decided to stay. The marriage was almost over.27

  The San Francisco experience gave Haley confidence that he belonged in a community of writers, but he did not publish much in those years. That his writing had stalled may have fueled his desire to return to New York when he retired from the Coast Guard after twenty years’ service. In 1959, at age thirty-eight, he was going to create his own fame as a writer.

  3

  People on the Way Up

  Nan Haley often told her husband, “You’re married to your typewriter.” In June 1959 she gave him an ultimatum. “She banged her hand on the kitchen table and said, ‘It’s me or that typewriter,’” he recalled. “I thought, ‘I wish you hadn’t phrased it that way.’” They both moved back to New York in the summer of 1959 but separated for good. Nan settled in Harlem, and Alex moved to a one-room basement studio apartment on Grove Street in Greenwich Village. Maintaining two residences and living on a relatively meager military pension meant that Nan and Alex faced hard financial times. He had not wanted her to work when the children were small. But “when Alex left me, I knew I had to work,” she said later. “I had to take care [of] and provide for my children. Because I knew that I could never depend on him.” By then she was angry at his financial irresponsibility. “It was always ‘when my ship comes in and when things get better, I’m going to do this for you, I’m going to do that for you.’ But he never did. . . . He did not do what he was supposed to do.” Years later, Nan bemoaned Alex’s failings as a husband. “I don’t think he ever let me get close to him. Only to cook, wash, have sex, that’s about it. . . . He always was secretive.” Haley never spoke speak critically of Nan and claimed that they “just sort of drifted apart.”1