After that, Haley embroidered his account to improve the story. He said that he just happened to be walking past the National Archives when something provoked him at the spur of the moment to go in. In fact, he already had a contract to write the book about his family, and doing genealogical research was an obvious step to take in its writing. “It gives me the quivers to reflect upon how easily, in fact, I might have walked on out of The National Archives and . . . and if I had, I’m sure I would have never, ever have given it another thought.” He attributed his translations of the African words, his “Rosetta Stone” moment, to Jan Vansina, when in fact he had gotten the translation from Ebou Manga. He met Vansina in person only after he had made two trips to Africa, including the important experience in Juffure. Perhaps Haley wanted the imprimatur of Vansina’s academic standing to validate his research.18
Haley recounted at length his “peak experience” of May 17, 1967, in Juffure. He told the story in much the same way he recorded it in his notes after the events, with both versions including his intense emotional reaction. The day’s events did not take place in quite the way he described them, however. A transcript of Kebba Kanga Fofana’s interaction with Haley and the translators contains none of the fluid oration that Haley later set down as his narrative. Prior to his meeting with Haley, the griot had been informed of Haley’s beliefs about the name of his ancestor and the date of Kunta Kinte’s capture. The griot may have accommodated his narrative to the facts that Haley had provided his Gambian sponsors. Haley may have been overcome with emotion from what the entire scene represented, but the emotion probably did not result from any surprises. Having narrated his peak experience, Haley then told of flying home to New York, meeting with publishers, and “finally [telling] them that I felt I had to write a book.” Of course, by the first occasion on which he delivered this lecture, in 1968, his book had been under contract for four years.19
Excellent storyteller that he was, Haley observed his listeners closely. “You watch your audience,” he explained later, “and see what the audience is responding to most.” Haley took out some elements and added others as he told the story over and over. In its early versions he talked about going to Ireland in search of his Jackson ancestors. The Irish did not seem to think it odd that an American black man was looking for an Irish ancestor. But “when they found out I was Protestant, they ran me out of town.” This was funny but probably not true; he did not mention it in accounts he wrote just after the visit. Over time, as his story became an exclusively African and black narrative, he deleted the passage about Ireland.20
By the time he finished the book, the “Saga of a People” lecture had become Haley’s version of the truth, even if he knew he had been unfaithful to it in some places. The lecture version is almost identical to the final chapters of the book he was writing. When confronted twenty years later with the inconsistencies in his story, Haley would say that none of them were “an effort to slick over something” but just part of “the quest for the symbolic history of a people.”21
* * *
In August 1969 Haley told Reynolds that he and Julie were going to divorce. “She’s doing all the mud-slinging she can, and one of my best defenses is that she not know where I am.” He warned Reynolds that Julie might call him asking for Haley’s whereabouts, which should not be revealed. She had taken to calling Haley at 3 a.m. and haranguing him for two hours. The break was finalized in June 1971. Haley was now supporting two ex-wives and his daughter Cynthia, only seven years old that year. Much of his lecture income was paid to Nan. By then The Autobiography of Malcolm X was a best seller, but the royalties for the mass-market paperback were small, and they were split with Betty Shabazz. He supplemented his income starting in 1968 by teaching at Hamilton College, where he had met Ebou Manga. “I was flattered like hell to go up there and actually be faculty,” he later said. Haley’s classes at Hamilton did not cover any subject in the college catalogue, and he did not hold class on a regular teaching schedule; what he taught was “really more a class in Alex Haley.” Hamilton needed him “for racial reasons,” seeing in him someone who could “represent black myths.” Students who needed good grades came to him. If he felt sympathy for the student, Haley gave him an A minus. Inevitably, criticism arose as word of his liberality with students got around. The next year he was made a “writer in residence.”22
Haley did not get much writing done at Hamilton, and in 1969 it began to catch up with him. In March he faced the anger of Hillel Black, president of William Morrow, for his failure to deliver a book of interviews contracted with Morrow in 1967. Reynolds tried to calm Black by sharing his own frustration: “He’s never completed his book to Doubleday,” and, indeed, Reynolds himself had not “seen a word of it.” Three years later, in 1972, Haley still had not written any of the book for Morrow, and Black demanded return of the $12,500 advance. Haley no longer had the money, and he passed responsibility for appeasing Black on to Reynolds. Reynolds’s frustration about not having seen any of “Before This Anger” caused Haley in late July 1969 to turn in what he had written. Though pleased to get something, Reynolds did not like what he saw. “You are going to need a great deal of condensation. . . . I would like a long, big book, 150,000 to 200,000 words, but not a million or million-and-a-half words.” Haley sent the text to Lisa Drew, who also thought it was poorly written. At this point Haley again turned to Murray Fisher, who took Haley’s swollen text, deleted a high percentage of the verbiage, and remade it into a coherent and readable narrative. In a surviving file named “Fisher-edited copy,” page after page of Haley’s text is covered with red editing marks. Reynolds read this copy and told Haley he was “off to a fine start.” Based on these chapters about the African origins of Haley’s family, Reynolds raised the question of whether the book was fact or fiction. “These pages are pretty fictionalized for the Digest magazine,” he observed, thinking of the serialization of the book. But he thought the manuscript would be fine for the Reader’s Digest Book Club, which published much fiction. Reynolds’s comments suggest that people in the publishing business accepted a liberal definition of historical truth. Others, it would turn out, had a much narrower criterion.23
Then progress on the book seemed to stop. Again, other projects diverted Haley. In the summer of 1970, he wrote a play he called “Booker,” the idea for which came to him in a dream. The play was another autobiographical exercise, about a man from Henning who migrates to the North and faces a jarring change of scene in a northern ghetto. “I realized I knew that play, in large part because I grew up in it,” he told Reynolds. “I simply could not refuse that play’s urgency to be born.” Haley told McCormick about the play, at the same time promising that he would have “Before This Anger” completed by the end of 1970. McCormick wrote to Reynolds, “This I will believe when I see it.” In late 1970 Haley confessed to Reynolds that with the help of an agent who had left Reynolds and knew of Haley’s financial problems, he had signed a contract to write a biography of Melvin Belli. “I simply was broke, in a mess, and trying anything that looked potential[ly] as a salvation.”24
By 1971 Reynolds had lost his good humor about Haley’s money problems and his inability to finish “Before This Anger,” now almost six years late. He reminded Haley that book contracts made in desperate pursuit of an immediate payday had compromised his long-term value as a writer: “Due to need of money you have got a not too desirable contract with Doubleday and a miserable commitment with Dell for the paperback.” But by 1971 the sales of The Autobiography of Malcolm X had cemented Haley’s reputation as a best-selling author. Haley wrote to Reynolds that high schools and colleges were desperate for any works on black history, and most of the readers were white students. Reynolds already knew that Haley’s stock had gone up. “A good idea for a book by Alex Haley put up for auction could bring an enormous sum of money,” he acknowledged. But he was adamant that Haley should not write the Belli book, which he thought would be
viewed as a puff biography.25
* * *
Haley’s financial and marital woes, combined with the slow pace of his writing, made the summer of 1971 a low point in his life. He turned toward the sea to get away from his ex-wives, the IRS, and the editors at Doubleday. He liked to say that he had learned to write on ships and did his best work on the high seas. In March 1971 he spent eleven days on the African Star, a freighter he boarded in Liberia for the Atlantic crossing. He later recounted how at night he stripped to his underwear and lay on a rough board in the cargo hold to get a sense of how the captive Kunta Kinte might have felt. But the feelings that this experience engendered further depressed Haley, because he could not fully imagine the suffering of someone chained in the belly of a ship. He stood on the dark deck one night and realized there was an answer to his problems. “Simply step through rail and drop into the sea. It was almost a euphoric feeling. . . . No more debts, no more deadlines, no more agonizing over slavery, no more nothing.” He later said that what prevented his jumping were the voices of the generations of women in his family telling him not to do it.26
Starting in May 1971 he took a Norwegian freighter on a three-month trip around South America. He reported that he got much writing done, although he left the ship for several days to go New York to finalize his divorce from Julie. In July 1972 Haley found a berth on a wooden ship, The Eagle, which sailed from Connecticut to Sweden, so that he might know the feeling of sailing on a ship like the one in which Kunta Kinte crossed the Atlantic. In December he left San Francisco for a fifty-five-day trip on the SS President Polk, a freighter bound for Taiwan. Haley relayed his shipboard schedule to a reporter friend in Chicago: “The first day goes to catch-up sleeping. The second day, suicidal impulses attend comprehending really how far behind in work I am. The third day, sorting it all into priorities, I start digging in. Well out by then, somewhere on the ocean commences the pure euphoria of writing for a disciplined 12 hours daily—resulting in a quantity of pages of draft copy seemingly impossible for me to achieve otherwise. Interspersed are ample naps, along with eating too much thrice daily . . . and the wee hours usually see meditative, introspective meanderings about the decks.”27
In 1972 Haley sought greater media attention for his book. In early May he made what would prove to be an effective change in the title, when he began referring to the work as “Roots.” In April Haley had appeared on the television quiz show To Tell the Truth, on which he was the figure he and two impostors claimed to be. He identified “Alex Haley” this way: “Actually my story is much more than the story of one family. In effect, I have charted the history of every black American. I say this because every one of us is directly descended from some African who was taken from his homeland, dragged to America, chained in the hold of a ship, and callously sold as a slave.” Later that year he appeared on David Frost’s late-night talk show and spoke with what the Christian Science Monitor reported was “a cool neutrality that adds to the excitement” of his writing project. In July 1972 Haley published his first article about the book since 1965. In “My Furthest-Back Person—The African,” which appeared in the New York Times Magazine, he gave an emotional rejection of his own mixed racial identity, one that departed from the earlier equanimity, even pride, about his Irish ancestry. Arriving in Juffure, he wrote, he had been surrounded by the villagers. “It hit me like a gale wind: every one of them, the whole crowd, was jet black. An enormous sense of guilt swept me—a sense of being some kind of hybrid . . . a sense of being impure among the pure. It was an awful sensation.”28
In August 1972 Paul Reynolds read a further-revised 408 pages of “Roots,” the part called “The African Heritage.” Reynolds thought the pages were “beautifully written” and added that if Haley wanted to become a novelist, “you would be a very successful one.” But Reynolds said he was “a little appalled at the length this book is going to be.” The book might have to be published in two or three volumes, because one book containing the entire text would require a price so high it would hurt sales. (Later in 1972 Haley reported that the 952 pages of the book had all been written the previous summer.) But in the spring of 1973, Doubleday made clear that it was publishing only a single volume.29
Haley taught black history at the University of California at Berkeley in the spring of 1973; there, he wrote the Middle Passage section of “Roots.” He also spent time in Los Angeles working with Fisher on the book. He liked California for the old friends there. Through Lou Blau, he now knew more people in Hollywood. By this time he was turning his ambitions to film and television, though he still talked about books that he would write after “Roots.” The money in Hollywood was better than in publishing, and his role in the creation of entertainment for television was less laborious than writing for print. He wrote the script for a 1973 film, Super Fly T.N.T., the sequel to the successful blaxploitation film Super Fly, starring Ron O’Neal as a Harlem cocaine dealer. O’Neal starred in and directed Super Fly T.N.T., which was a commercial and artistic failure.30
In May 1973 Haley told Reynolds that he planned to take out a loan for a year’s projected expenses so that he could stop lecturing and spend long periods of time writing aboard freighters. Reynolds thought that was a good idea, because he was “beginning to get a backlash” from those—no doubt at Doubleday—demanding to know, “Where is the book?” It is not clear whether Haley got the bank loan, but he certainly did not abandon the lecture circuit. He gave thirty-seven lectures in the next year. But rather than spend another summer on a merchant ship, he rented a house in Negril, a village on Jamaica’s western coast. He loved the setting and the climate. There were few telephones, and the mail was slow. He worked there for much of the next two years.31
In 1973 the IRS put a lien on Haley’s bank account. He had deposited $800 and written checks for twenty-two bills, every one of which bounced because the IRS had confiscated his funds. “That kind of thing would plunge you into an abyss and for that moment, [I thought], you dumb son of a bitch, what in the world are you doing?” Julie had been put in a psychiatric hospital, and he needed money to look after Cindy, now nine years old.32
Help came from Hollywood. In 1974 Columbia Pictures canceled its 1968 contract for film rights to “Roots” because of the studio’s financial problems. Lou Blau then negotiated with Warner Bros. for film rights to “Roots,” but nothing came of that. David Wolper, a producer of documentaries, had heard of Haley’s book in 1969 from the actress Ruby Dee, wife of Ossie Davis. Dee and Davis had known Haley through Malcolm X, and at black arts events in New York, they heard him talk about his family research. From the moment Wolper heard of “Roots,” he wanted to produce it. In 1974 Wolper heard that Warner had relinquished the rights, contacted Blau, and negotiated a contract for a television series. He paid Haley a $50,000 option on the $250,000 full fee for rights when the book was finished.33
With Hollywood money starting to flow, Haley bought a house in Jamaica. At Blau’s suggestion he set up the Kinte Corporation, a tax shelter. He and his brother George were planning to produce a line of dolls and other memorabilia that capitalized on the new interest in the African past. They had already created a foundation to gather material for a genealogical library. Leonard Jeffries, chair of the Black Studies Department at the City University of New York, did much of the work for this project. The Haleys received a grant from the Carnegie Corporation for almost a half-million dollars to get the library going. “Probably I’ve become the person most knowledgeable about black genealogy,” Haley told the Wall Street Journal in 1972. That seemingly harmless boast set him up for later criticism.34
* * *
Reynolds congratulated Haley on the television deal but warned him, “With no book, your whole house of cards would fall to pieces.” Though Haley maintained warm relations with Lisa Drew, by 1974 he felt embittered toward the publishing house. He told Reynolds that he had “a deep canker in my insides” against Doubleday, becaus
e it had “consistently pinched, and squinched as if [this book] was some marginal gamble by an unproved writer.” Murray Fisher had told him that writers broke contracts all the time to get more money, and Haley wanted to do that. Reynolds dismissed all suggestion that they might get another publisher to buy Doubleday out of the book. “It’s known all over New York that you’ve been writing this book for 7 years. Any publisher is going to wonder whether the next two-thirds of the book can be written and finished within six months or a year.” At the same time, Drew was getting constant demands from Doubleday executives to either get a book out of Haley or get the company’s money back. She defused the situation by saying the book was almost finished as she tried to get Haley to complete it.35
Drew and Ken McCormick, now semiretired, had read the 871 pages of the book delivered in November 1973. They enlisted Reynolds to try to get the book finished. Drew told Reynolds that some of the writing was good but other parts were “simply too long and lose the impact of what Haley is trying to say by excessive repetition.” She and McCormick thought the conversations that Haley had created among slaves during the American Revolution were unrealistic and “beyond [the slaves’] scope, given their limited education.” Neither of the editors wanted to include a section at the end of the book about Haley’s research. The Doubleday staff was relieved when Haley insisted in April 1974 that the book would be submitted in the next few weeks. Reynolds deflated their hopes. “Alex will never deliver in May or June. . . . His problem is money and he’s had to go back to lecturing.” Sure enough, Doubleday did not receive any more of the manuscript until December 1974, thirteen months after the previous installment had come in.36
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