Alex Haley

by Robert J. Norrell

Haley later said he heard no more because what Fofana said “meshed perfectly with what I’d heard on the front porch in Henning.” Haley asked the interpreters to explain to Fofana and the villagers that this was the story he had heard in America. Then the people formed a circle around him and, moving counterclockwise, began chanting softly, then loudly, and then softly again. Then, one after another, the mothers of the village stepped into the circle, thrust a baby into Haley’s arms for a long moment, and then snatched it back. This was a ritual, an anthropologist later explained to him, in which the women said, in effect, “Through this flesh which is us, we are you and you are us.” The photographer took pictures of Haley and his relatives, and then they all went to the village’s tiny mosque. The main message of the villager’s prayer that day was, “Praise be to Allah for one who has been long lost from us, whom Allah has returned.”

  Haley returned to Bathurst overland, passing through the village called Kinte-Kundeh-Janneh-Ya. Villagers lined up to see Haley, now standing up in a Land Rover, and all of them were chanting something that he did not at first understand. Elders in white robes, maidens and mothers, naked children, all looked up at Haley, waving their arms and crying out together in English, “Meester Kinte! Meester Kinte!” He later said, “A sob hit me at about ankle level and just rolled up. . . . I began just shrieking, crying as I have never cried before or since in my life.”

  Alex Haley would often say that this day in Juffure and Kinte Kundah Janneh-Ya was the “peak experience” of his life. His account of that day would be the main pivot in the book he would write, but it would also be a story that raised many doubts about whether it happened the way he told it.

  7

  The American Griot

  On his return from Africa in late May, Haley reported to Paul Reynolds that he could now trace his family back nine generations, to 1705. He was even more ecstatic about the book’s prospects. He thought it would have a reception comparable to that of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which was in its author’s description a “nonfiction novel” about the murders of a Kansas family and had sold 325,000 copies in 1966. Capote acknowledged that he had imagined parts of the book, and he insisted that his departure from facts improved it. Reynolds raised the matter on his mind. “When will I be able to see the first 100 pages?” Almost three years had passed since the book contract was signed, and the book was a year and a half past the promised delivery date. Haley replied, “Don’t you worry, friend: I push me harder than any six other people ever could.” In July Reynolds wrote: “How much have you got on paper? I long, oh I long to read the first 50 pages as soon as possible.” In August Haley told Reynolds he was “working beautifully” on the book. “I get goose pimples. It’s going to be so great!” He promised to deliver the finished manuscript in December 1967. Still having seen nothing in September, Reynolds pleaded with Haley: “I think the time has come to completely stop all research work and write the book.”1

  Haley had returned from Africa with a determination to discover the ship that had brought Kunta Kinte to America. In the summer of 1967, he spent six weeks looking in shipping records at Lloyd’s of London in search of the right ship. He got frustrated at not finding it and angry that participants in the slave trade regarded their work “simply as another major industry, rather like the buying, selling, and shipping of livestock today.” Then, while looking over the 1,023rd sheet of slave-ship records, he found a listing of about thirty ships that had entered and exited the Gambia River. Well down the page, he saw an entry for the Lord Ligonier, captained by Thomas Davies, which on July 5, 1767, set sail for Annapolis, Maryland, with 140 slaves.2

  Haley believed that this was the discovery that tied the information he had gained at Juffure about the capture of Kunta Kinte to his ancestor’s arrival in America. He immediately flew to Washington, and at the Library of Congress he examined a book he had seen earlier, concerning ships arriving at Annapolis. This book confirmed that the Lord Ligonier had arrived in Annapolis on September 29, 1767. He then looked at a Maryland newspaper for the time and saw an advertisement: “just imported, In the ship of Lord Ligonier, Capt. Davies, from the River Gambia . . . A Cargo of choice healthy slaves.” The ad mentioned ninety-eight slaves for sale, which meant that 30 percent of the original 140 Africans on board had perished. Haley then raced to Annapolis, where he worked at the Hall of Records at St. John’s College. On September 29, 1967, exactly two hundred years after Kunta Kinte had presumably arrived there, Haley stood on a dock and looked at the Atlantic Ocean.3

  In October 1967 Haley went to Madison, Wisconsin, to meet with Jan Vansina at last. It is not clear whether he revealed to Vansina that he had already translated the African words handed down in his family. Vansina confirmed the translation that Ebou Manga had offered a year earlier. He consulted with his fellow Africanist at Wisconsin, Philip Curtin, who came to the same conclusion about the Mandinka words and the likelihood of Haley’s ancestor descending from the Kinte clan in the Gambia River region.4

  Haley was slow to begin the writing of his book. He loved to do research and intended to insert as much historical authenticity as possible into “Before This Anger.” He and George Sims studied anthropological works on West African life. Sims, who did not type, took notes in longhand, often on library order slips. Haley then typed them or gave them to a typist. He accumulated thousands of pages of notes typed on strips of paper and stapled onto full sheets. Periodically, he rearranged, purged, and added to his notes and then retyped them. Sometimes the source of the information was lost from one copy of notes to the next. Haley always told his agent and editors that the writing was going well, even as he delayed sending them the manuscript, but he struggled to get words on paper during the first five years of the project. He drafted “Before This Anger” in longhand on legal pads, relying on his memory of his mountain of notes. The first draft was a compendium of anthropological information on African life. The text was disjointed, overly detailed, and clumsy, as first drafts often are. He said privately that he was only an adequate writer; his talent lay in storytelling, which he did best orally. But after the book was finished, he would tell a somewhat different story. He said in 1976 to an interviewer from Publishers Weekly that there was “nothing I’d rather do” than write, “except perhaps be a surgeon.” Both writing and surgery were “delicate, careful work, and I act like a surgeon.” When he was writing, he said, he practiced a surgeon’s hygiene. “I take six showers a day, and wash my hands maybe 20 times.” But he also acted like a musician. “When it’s going well, I find myself tapping my foot in rhythm with the keys, as if there’s a cadence going.” He wrote first drafts at night, when he was tired, “and then do the surgical work in the morning when I’m sharp.”5

  One way to avoid writing was to do more research. Haley examined hearings in the British House of Commons on the slave trade. He traveled to Wilberforce, England, to study artifacts from the slave trade and British abolitionism. In trying to understand the perils of the Middle Passage, he studied the habits of sharks that trailed trans-Atlantic ships. He searched the Virginia State Archives for family records of “Massa Waller,” who had purchased the African. He traveled to Spotsylvania County, Virginia, and wandered on paths he believed Kunta Kinte had also walked. He did the same in Caswell County, North Carolina, where Chicken George had lived. In early 1968 Haley went to Scotland to research cockfighting, Chicken George’s vocation. He spent months researching blacksmithing, Tom Murray’s trade.6

  After his six months of research in the Gambia, London, and Washington, Haley spent two months in Haut de Cagnes, France, a village near Nice, to write “Before This Anger.” He sublet an apartment from the actor James Earl Jones, whom he had gotten to know when the actor sought him out in the hope of playing Malcolm on the stage and screen. In France he also met with James Baldwin, who was writing the script, based on Malcolm X’s autobiography, to be made into a play directed by Elia Kazan. Haley was
worried that Louis Lomax already had a deal with Twentieth-Century Fox for a movie about Malcolm’s life. Kazan abandoned the idea of a play because he had heard that Columbia Pictures was going to make a film about Malcolm X. In March 1968 Vincent Canby reported in the New York Times that there were two Malcolm X films in production.7

  At the end of 1967, Haley wrote to Ken McCormick and Lisa Drew, who were now assuming most of the responsibility for Haley’s work, about “Before This Anger.” He was on his way home from France with, “hopefully,” a full draft. Yet he had written little of the book. Years later, he admitted that “many times” he told Drew that the writing of the book was much further along than it was, because he thought it would “help her feel better while I finished.” In 1977, when Haley himself was the subject of a Playboy interview, he told of how he had placed 750 pages of typed manuscript on Drew’s desk. He had polished the first twenty pages and the last few and then tucked more than 700 pages of typed notes in between. “She began to read the first page, then the second and the third, and she began to smile, wider and wider. But when she kept on turning pages, I started talking and kept talking, faster and faster, asking so many questions that she finally began skimming and then riffling around page 15. Then, as I knew she would from long acquaintance, she turned to the last page and read it carefully. I’d really poured it on at the end, and when she looked up, it was with moist eyes and a tremulous smile.” Drew was happy when he left, and he was, too, because Doubleday had decided to give him more advance money.8

  All the travel in 1967 had left Haley in dire financial straits, and he hoped that the solution to his problem would be to sell the movie rights to “Before This Anger.” In 1968 Barnaby Conrad introduced him to Louis Blau, a Hollywood lawyer and agent who had represented Conrad and such stars as John Wayne. Blau was not familiar with Haley’s work, but Blau’s son, a student at Hollywood High School, told him that The Autobiography of Malcolm X was his favorite book. Blau listened for three hours as Haley spun out his family story. He and Haley then met with Columbia Pictures executives, who optioned the movie rights for $50,000. Haley’s half of that represented the biggest payday he had ever had.9

  Starting in 1967, Haley’s lecture schedule grew heavier each year, and the momentum was due mostly to the growing influence of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. He had witnessed Malcolm at the college lectern, and he appreciated the power that one could exert there. Performing well gave Haley a rush of excitement, and lecturing appealed to his desire to influence young blacks’ thinking about their past and whites’ thinking about blacks. He seemed to be born to the lecture stage. The Harvard professor Richard Marius, himself a Tennessean and a noted storyteller, wrote that Haley “ambled to the platform always with an air of becoming modesty. He faced his audience with a genial reserve, and he spoke in a conversational baritone, reeling off stories of his childhood, of women rocking on a front porch, the sound of their rockers going ‘thump-thump’ as they mused over the oral history of their ancestors.” Haley’s lectures were like the public appearances of Frederick Douglass and other escaped slaves who spoke of the horrors of slavery to sympathetic audiences in the antebellum North and in England.10

  Haley delivered twenty lectures in 1967, most of them for $500 each, of which the Colston Leigh Agency took 35 percent for booking the lectures and arranging his travel. In 1968 he gave forty-one lectures, in 1969 fifty-six, and in 1970 fifty-nine. About 90 percent of the lectures were to college audiences. Fees for lectures were rising rapidly in the late 1960s. By 1969 Haley was earning an average of $800 per lecture, and in 1970 most lectures were done for $1,000 (about $6,000 in 2015). He continued to give talks with titles such as “What the Negro Must Do for Himself” and “The Story Behind the Story of Malcolm X,” but his most popular lecture was “Saga of a People,” based on “Before This Anger.” Haley gave this lecture over and over, more than a thousand times. “Roots was spread all over before it was published,” he said. He estimated he had talked to more than a million people about the book. At each lecture, he promised that the book would be finished in six months’ time. Soon Doubleday began to get hundreds of letters from people who had been in Haley’s audiences and wanted to know where that book was. He later said: “I never really thought I was saying what was not accurate; I really felt I’d be finished with it in six months.”11

  On the lecture trail, Haley encountered people who helped him advance his research. After the lecture, listeners sometimes handed him notes with research leads. At Simpson College in Iowa, he was approached after his lecture by the college’s dean, Waller Wiser, who explained that he was descended from the Waller family of Virginia, who had owned Kunta Kinte. Wiser explained that his wife was an excellent genealogist and knew his family’s history well. Haley went home with Wiser that night, soon returned to give a commencement address and receive his first honorary doctorate from the college, and continued to gather information on the Wallers.12

  The Black Power movement advanced Haley’s career as a campus lecturer. In 1968 student revolts took place on campuses across the United States, initially in protest against the Vietnam War. Black students used the turmoil to advance Black Power. When Students for a Democratic Society occupied buildings at Columbia University in the spring of 1968, black members ejected white students, invited people from Harlem to campus, and demanded that Columbia change its name to “Malcolm X University.” The winter and spring of 1969 brought Black Power protests in which African American students occupied buildings on campuses across the country. They demanded that colleges enroll more black students and hire more black faculty, create centers for black culture, and include in their curricula more study of African culture and African American history. These demands reflected the rising Black Studies movement, begun in 1967 at San Francisco State University, which promoted Black Power and all forms of black nationalism. The editor of the journal Black Scholar declared in 1969 that “a black-studies program which is not revolutionary and nationalistic is, accordingly, quite profoundly irrelevant.” Black Power accelerated the need for black speakers on college campuses. In 1968 a New York Times writer concluded that “the most popular form of anti-establishmentarianism, the big shtick on campus today, is Black Power,” which came “in several shades of militance but a single scorching degree of intensity.” Black Power advocates Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown were on the lecture circuit, as was the sardonic critic of white society, Dick Gregory.13

  Haley offered a softer and more palatable expression of black nationalism. If Carmichael and Brown gave voice to the black anger against whites, Haley expressed pride in the black family and the connection to Africa and African peoples that had always been central to the ideology. His posture was compatible with the emerging Black Is Beautiful movement, which encouraged wearing dashikis and “natural” hair, the style soon called “the Afro.” The story he told was not just about his family; it was “the saga of a people. Every black person shares this ancestral story of capture, slavery and obliteration.” In 1969 he spoke at a conference of black students from all over New England, titled “Black Power: Milestone Toward Unity.” Workshops at the conference included “Bridging the Black Generation Gap” and “Relationship Between the Black Man and His Black Woman.” Haley’s talk on his search for his family’s roots provided cultural and historical balance to the intensely political nature of the remainder of the conference. He later spoke at the University of Connecticut. “Alex Haley tells a story that brings audiences to their feet around the country, and it’s not a political story,” the local newspaper reported. The 250 listeners gave shouts of “Right on!” during the standing ovation after he spoke.14

  Newspaper coverage brought more attention to Haley. In 1969 UPI ran a story headlined, “Negro Finds Tracing Ancestry No Easy Task.” The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that Haley had riveted the audience at a local college. “He’s probably the only one of the 25 million black Americans who ever will fin
d out who his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was. . . . This systematic destruction of families during the slave days killed the sense of tradition and history among America’s Negroes.” In 1972 the Wall Street Journal noted that Haley’s message came at a time “when blacks, particularly students, are seeking to forge a sense of solidarity based on a documentable heritage.” College professors and administrators noted that the interest in black genealogy coincided “with a decline in campus militancy and a rise in the introspection among students.” It represented “a rechanneling of the impetus—sparked by the Black Power movement of the 1960s—to reaffirm the positive aspects of black culture.”15

  Haley knew the lectures were building a huge audience for the book. In early 1971 he encouraged Reynolds and McCormick to attend a lecture at New York University. By now, seven years after Haley had signed the original contract, each man’s patience with the writer had almost run out. Haley wanted them to “gain some visual and aural appreciation of the way that by now literal[ly] hundreds of thousands of people (in audiences for three years) across the country [are] awaiting this book.” McCormick found that Haley’s lecture “absolutely hypnotized” the audience, himself included.16

  * * *

  Haley’s “Saga of a People” lecture, which comprised about sixty typed pages and took him two hours to deliver, has been preserved from an audio recording. It appears to be from a relatively late version of the lecture, given after he had perfected his delivery over hundreds of occasions. The transcription has no paragraphing and thus leaves the impression of a stream-of-consciousness recitation, when in fact there is a clear structure. The lecture was the first draft of what would become Roots. Haley began with his childhood and the scene on Cynthia’s front porch in Henning, when the old ladies told, retold, and acted out the family history. One of the ladies would start talking about something that had happened in her girlhood, and “she would kind of turn around rather abruptly and thrust her finger down [at] me and exclaim something like, ‘I wasn’t any bigger than young’n here.’” He told of the capture of the African and the brutal punishment his rebellion brought from his white masters. Slaveowners’ denial of his African name was “the first step in the psychic dehumanization of an individual or collectively of a people.” Haley recited the Mandinka words that the African handed down, Haley’s Rosetta Stone for unlocking his past. Ten pages into the text, Haley returned to his own life, recounting it with self-deprecation and good humor. Enlistment in the service, he now thought, “was to play its role in this book,” because it was “meant to be” that he would get out in the world and have an opportunity to become a writer, starting with composing letters for his fellow sailors.17