Alex Haley

by Robert J. Norrell

  Haley maintained contact with his children but made little time for them. His son, Fella, lived with him for a while in the Village after the teenager was accused of having sex with a minor girl in Harlem in 1962. The disposition of the charge is not clear. Fella entered the army in the mid-1960s and served with the 101st Airborne Division as a paratrooper in Vietnam.2

  Money problems plagued Haley from his first days out of the Coast Guard. He pursued freelance writing jobs far and wide, but they did not come quickly. “I was literally hanging on by my fingernails, trying to make it as a magazine writer,” he remembered. One fellow Coast Guard veteran noted that it was hard for some men to adjust to fending entirely for themselves, saying, “Alex lost control of his finances.” A friend told him about a civil service job as a “public information officer,” for which Haley was well qualified. The friend, to whom Haley owed money, promised that he could get Haley the job if he agreed to take it immediately. Haley finally said that he wanted to “keep on trying to make it [with] writing.” At that point his Greenwich Village cupboard held only two cans of sardines and his pocket only eighteen cents, which he spent on a head of cabbage. He thought, “There’s nowhere to go but up.”3

  Haley longed for the writing community to which Barnaby Conrad had introduced him in San Francisco. He wrote to several writers then living in Greenwich Village. He heard only from James Baldwin. “Jimmy, bless him . . . perceived, that I was really crying for a shoulder to lean on.” Baldwin walked into Haley’s basement apartment, “as if we were old buddies and writing peers, and sat down, cross-legged on the little hassock I had, and talked to me for an hour . . . about nothing in particular, and not that much about writing. But he said to me, in his actions, that he regarded me as a peer. And that did more for me than he could ever know.” The two became good friends.4

  More companionship came from George Sims, a boyhood friend from Henning, a tall, light-skinned man married to an Irish woman at a time when interracial marriages were uncommon. Sims had settled in Greenwich Village and worked as a janitor and bank messenger. He had arranged for Haley to live in the basement apartment of his building. Sims had an avid curiosity about black history that he satisfied by spending nights and weekends at the New York Public Library. He reputedly had a photographic memory. In the early 1960s Sims and Haley spent many late evenings wandering about Greenwich Village. They chatted about Henning, the people they knew there, and the meaning of the lives they had observed. The time spent with Sims in Greenwich Village nurtured Alex’s autobiographical instincts. The two men were close companions for the next thirty years, and Sims became Haley’s research assistant.

  Haley wrote in his diary on New Year’s Day 1962 that he was hard at work writing, pausing only a few minutes to have a drink with the Simses before recording his resolutions for the future: “This year, I hope, will see a number of aspirations accomplished, chief among them my first book—at this writing, the book on Henning, and that it will prove a resounding success.” This is the first recorded mention of his conscious intention to write about his background.5

  Years later he wrote an unpublished autobiographical novel in the third person, set during these years in New York. One scene depicted Alex visiting Nan at her job as a waitress. In the novel she works because she enjoys it, not because she has to, and “Alex wishes she wouldn’t work.” He hands her his pension check, and Nan pushes it back to him. She senses that something is disturbing him but knows that she “probably can’t get close to it.” She asks about his writing, and “he says a little too much about how well it’s going.” He will have to “install a bigger mailbox to handle all the checks!” The next scene describes his mailbox as overflowing with rejected manuscripts and unpaid bills. “He hasn’t had a sale in too long. . . . turned down by all the best magazines. What’s wrong?” George Sims offers to get Haley a job as a messenger at the bank where he works. In the next scene, “Alex is in a messenger’s uniform which is too small in some places and too big in others.” His white boss is overbearing and condescending, and on the job, Haley is “shunted aside, ignored, treated as though he were a mindless robot.” He feels like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: “Nothing. Nobody.”6

  He returns home to his basement cell, like the one the Invisible Man occupies, to find his father waiting for him in the hall. Simon Haley looks at the messenger’s uniform and asks what Alex has done to himself. “Three sons I’ve got . . . a lawyer, an architect—and a messenger boy.” Simon has let Alex find his own way, but now Simon thinks that was a mistake, and he is “ready to move back into the vacuum.” His response to Alex’s poor achievement is the same as always: college. Alex refuses, because he is going to be a writer. He tries to make peace with Simon, but his father is bitterly disappointed in him. “And what next?” Simon asks. “A janitor? A shoe-shine?” The next day on the job, Haley lashes out at white women who refuse to acknowledge his presence. “Look at me! I’m somebody, you hear? I’m a person. Look at me!” He angrily quits the messenger job.

  Haley’s autobiographical novel revealed his fear of failure during his first years after leaving the Coast Guard. His commitment to writing did in fact falter amid his financial struggles. He applied for corporate public relations jobs and included his photograph with his resume, so there would be no awkwardness at an interview. Despite excellent qualifications, he never got an interview. He did work briefly as a bank messenger. Whether or not the interaction with Simon in the novel was based on a real event, it showed his hurt at his father’s disappointment in him. It would have been uncharacteristic of Haley to lash out at the white women ignoring him, but the scene he created suggested the kind of anger found in the writing of Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin. Haley was at work on imagining a narrative of his life that dwelt on the obstacles he had overcome.

  In the early 1960s Haley pursued magazine assignments intensively. He queried various magazines about a wide range of story ideas and was forced to develop a thick skin. He renewed connections to Coronet, Reader’s Digest, and the Saturday Evening Post. He discussed story ideas with the editors of the men’s pulp magazine Climax and talked about possible celebrity pieces for Hugh Hefner’s Show Business Illustrated. He developed a profile of the comedian Phyllis Diller, whom he had known in San Francisco, where she began her career; he eventually sold the piece to the Saturday Evening Post.7 Haley then began to focus on profiles of black celebrities. He developed a list of what he called “People on the Way Up.” He developed stories on Lena Horne, Leontyne Price, Dick Gregory, Leadbelly, Floyd Patterson, and the Olympian Ralph Boston. None of these articles, together representing many months of work in 1960 and 1961, was published. Freelance writing was often a demoralizing pursuit.

  In 1962, he did place a long piece on the theme of black achievement in Cosmopolitan magazine, at that point still a literary and arts publication. Haley wrote a history of black contributions to American musical culture that touched on the evolution of African traditions through spirituals, minstrels, blues, and jazz, culminating in musical theater in the mid-twentieth century. He connected dozens of black artists to one or another of the musical genres and ended on a triumphal note: “It will be an exciting future indeed when Negro contributions in other fields equal those made in the musical life of America.”8

  Haley began to connect with entertainment celebrities in New York. In February 1961 he attended a performance of Il Trovatore with the singer and actress Lena Horne; her husband, Lennie Hayton, a white composer of big band music and Hollywood musical scores, including “Singin’ in the Rain”; and the sociologist and social reformer Jeanne Noble, who had recently become a professor at New York University. Afterward, he had dinner with them at Sardi’s, a theater district restaurant. Horne and Noble were members of the black sorority Delta Sigma Theta, and both were involved in civil rights activism. Haley was making contacts with an entertainment elite that might help him on the way up as a writer. But he may also
have been having a romance with Noble, a thirty-four-year-old Georgia native. Like Nan, she was a pretty, light-skinned woman who went on to a distinguished career in academics and public service. In his autobiographical novel, Haley describes a relationship he had had with a young, black, and ambitious woman he called “Gwen Richards.” He finally breaks off their relationship because he is more committed to his writing than he is to Gwen.9

  Haley’s most successful connection in the world of magazine writing proved to be with Reader’s Digest. In the early 1920s, DeWitt Wallace had recognized that there was a rapidly expanding middle-brow audience for periodical literature and that there were far too many magazines published for the average person to keep up with all the good journalism. Wallace liked articles that were uplifting, that revealed the tenacity of the human spirit and people’s capacity to help others. It may have been at Reader’s Digest that Haley acquired the maxim he often offered: “Find something good and praise it.” In 1960 and 1961 Haley developed a number of stories for the Digest, most of them profiles of celebrities, black and white. His most noteworthy article was an adoring piece on Percival Scott, his boss on the Murzim. Still, fewer than half the stories he wrote for Reader’s Digest were published.

  The stories that did appear in print were all profiles of talented African Americans who had overcome great obstacles and remained humble, unchanged by great success. Haley wrote about two gold medal–winning Olympians from poor black families, the high jumper John Thomas and the sprinter Wilma Rudolph. Thomas had suffered a terrible injury to his leg but recovered and returned to the top of the field. Haley quoted Thomas’s white coach about him: “A kid so nice you’d be proud if he was your own.” Wilma Rudolph had been born with what everyone believed were hopelessly crippled legs—everyone except her mother, who was determined that her twentieth child would walk. At great sacrifice, she got her daughter the therapy that enabled her finally to walk at age eight, and by eighteen, Wilma had grown to be a gazelle-like sprinter. She won three gold medals at the Rome Olympics in 1960 and then returned to her small Tennessee hometown and prepared to be an elementary school teacher. Haley’s profile of Mahalia Jackson, “She Makes a Joyful Noise,” tells of the singer’s rise from humble beginnings in New Orleans, where her gift of a powerful soprano voice was spotted early. Jackson often turned down lucrative deals that would have meant switching from gospel music to blues and jazz. Haley placed her in the context of black Christianity and portrayed her loyalty to gospel music as her chief virtue.10

  In 1963 Haley turned to his family experiences in “The Man Who Wouldn’t Quit.” Here he told the story of his brother George’s struggle as one of the first blacks to enter the University of Arkansas law school in the early 1950s. George was a model young man, a war veteran and an outstanding college student, the academic star of the Haley family. Simon Haley, now teaching in Arkansas, had persuaded George to be a pioneer of desegregation. George suffered abuse from other students and isolation from the law school community, and in his first year he wanted to quit. But he endured the hardships, finally made a white friend, Miller Williams, and ended his legal education on the school’s law review. At the end of his piece, Haley announced proudly that George was a successful lawyer and a rising star in Republican politics in Kansas—and revealed that George was his brother.

  This story ran in spite of the angry opposition of Miller Williams, who in 1963 was on faculty in the English Department at Louisiana State University, having forsaken law for poetry. Williams feared the possible impact that public exposure of his support for racial integration in Arkansas would have on him and his family, given the volatile racial atmosphere of Louisiana. He had originally been asked to collaborate with Haley on the article, but after traveling to Kansas City to interview George, Williams was cut out of the process, he said, without compensation. Alex, he said, nonetheless promised that Williams would have a chance to review anything said by or about him before it went into print. But Williams said that he was not given that chance and that George ignored his pleas for help. After threatening Alex Haley and Reader’s Digest with a lawsuit, he was sent galley proofs for the article, which was due out in days. Miller then informed Alex that one anecdote in the story was fabricated: “I get the impression that your attitude has been, ‘What does it matter, so long as I got the information I needed, and so long as I get me a good story?’” He demanded that Haley “get rid of my name and my teaching at L.S.U.” Furthermore, “the remarks attributed clearly to me are self-disparaging, they are inane, and they are false.” But the story ran with Williams’s name, his affiliation with Louisiana State, the allegedly false anecdote, and a quote attributed to Miller asking George to be the godfather of his daughter Lucinda. Alex Haley wrote to the Reader’s Digest legal department that Williams was upset that he had been cut out of a byline and that his need for money could explain “his seeming anxiety to file some potentially lucrative suit.”11

  There was a postscript to this situation: in a few years, Miller and Lucinda Williams got away from Louisiana unharmed and settled at the University of Arkansas, where he established a university press and became a nationally renowned poet. Lucinda became a celebrated singer and songwriter, nominated fifteen times for Grammy Awards and winning three. Bill Clinton asked Miller Williams to read his poem “Of History and Hope” at the 1997 presidential inauguration. And in 1998 Clinton appointed the staunchly Republican George Haley ambassador to the Gambia.

  By 1962 Haley’s freelance career was taking off. His work benefited from extensive critiques by Reader’s Digest editors, especially a senior editor, Charles Ferguson. In 1963 the Digest arranged to pay Haley a monthly stipend of $300 and to cover his travel expenses as he scouted for stories. It was an unusual—and fortunate—arrangement for a freelance writer. The Digest paid him $12,000 in 1963. He wrote ten articles, of which the editors bought only two, for $4,000 each. He began to place stories with other magazines too. “I got to the point I’d sell one in every five and then gradually one in every four. Eventually I became able to sell just about whatever I wrote, particularly after I began to be assigned stories by editors who had. . . . acquired a certain amount of confidence that I could execute an assignment. I could make a month’s pay with one article.”12

  * * *

  Haley’s rise as a freelance writer was linked in part to the growing notoriety of the Nation of Islam (NOI). He had first heard of the Nation when a black musician he knew in San Francisco went home to Detroit, was converted to the sect, and returned saying, “The white man is the devil.” In July 1959, about the time Haley got back to New York, Mike Wallace produced a sensationalist depiction of the group, The Hate That Hate Produced, for a local commercial New York station. Widely viewed, the report introduced the Nation to a white population previously unaware of it. The Nation had mosques in fifty American cities, and Wallace showed that some blacks had embraced the “flagrant doctrine of black supremacy.” Elijah Muhammad, known by his followers as “the Messenger” of Allah, led the Nation. Muhammad declared that blacks were not originally or naturally Christians. Among the sensational statements Wallace highlighted was the Messenger’s promise “to give the call” for destruction of the white man by 1970. The Hate That Hate Produced also brought before the camera Malcolm X, a handsome, red-headed, copper-skinned man whose speeches riveted listeners, whether they agreed with him or not. Malcolm was brilliant at the podium and on television. His crackling baritone voice and his razor-edged opinions about white society’s hypocrisies made for irresistible listening. In 1958 an FBI informant reported that Malcolm was an “expert organizer and an untiring worker” whose hatred for whites was not likely to “erupt in violence as he is much too clever and intelligent for that.”13

  Malcolm recounted the Nation’s creation story: the serpent in the garden with Adam and Eve was Yacub, a white man, from whom the pale races of men evolved. African civilization was originally superior to European civiliz
ation, and only through millennia of oppression had people been led to believe otherwise. Blacks were not really in favor of integration, Malcolm insisted, because it polluted black interests. The NAACP was a “black body with white head.” Malcolm was most compelling when he justified the Nation’s hatred of “the white devil.” Whites’ characterization of members of the Nation as subversive was outrageous, he said: “Here is a man who has raped your mother and hung your father on his tree, is he subversive? Here is a man who robbed you of all knowledge of your nation and your religion and is he subversive?”14

  Malcolm had moved to Harlem in 1954 and transformed NOI Mosque No. 7 into an exciting place with a growing membership. Harlem residents seemed irresistibly drawn to him. His duties soon included expanding the Nation along the East Coast, which he did with astonishing success. He later claimed that the national membership of the Nation was only about four hundred when he began preaching but numbered in the tens of thousands by 1959. Malcolm and the Nation’s message of strict personal conduct appealed to a growing number of residents of dangerous black ghettos.15