Alex Haley

by Robert J. Norrell

  In the press to finish the book, Haley relied heavily on Murray Fisher. Fisher would later claim to have been Haley’s “personal editor” and “deeply involved in the creation” of Roots—a fair claim by any standard of measure. In 1969 Fisher had so completely rewritten the African portion of the book—150 pages, almost a fourth of the book—that the prose was probably more his than Haley’s. In 1973 Haley had informed Reynolds that he wanted Fisher to get 10 percent of the proceeds of the book in repayment for his great contribution to the work and 5 percent of all movie residuals. The editors at Doubleday had little knowledge of Fisher’s role in editing the book until 1974, when, with some desperation, they agreed that Fisher could make the cuts Doubleday wanted in the 871 pages received in November. Fisher was an overbearing and interfering man who exceeded the bounds of editor. He objected to Reynolds that he had not been given an opportunity to edit the copy that Reader’s Digest was excerpting. A furious Haley told Fisher that he was not to call Reynolds or anyone else handling the production of “Roots.” Haley told Reynolds that Fisher was “an aggressive, dominating type of personality, which I regard as fine for his own life, but don’t thrust it upon me.” If Fisher did not back off, Haley would not let him see the second half of the manuscript. If he fired Fisher but had to keep paying him, “I’d regard it as another costly lesson learned.” But the fact was that Haley needed Fisher to get the second half of the book out. About three hundred pages of new text reached New York in early 1975. Reynolds thought it was good but needed some cutting. Haley again turned to Fisher to attend to such problems.37

  Haley kept Drew in the dark about his progress, or lack thereof. She pleaded with Reynolds for information on what Haley was doing. In May 1975, David Wolper expressed concern that “Roots” would not be finished soon enough to appear in bookstores before March 1976, when the television series was scheduled to air. Haley then promised that he would deliver the final manuscript to Doubleday by June 15, 1975. In mid-June Drew went to Jamaica with the intention of giving editorial suggestions to Haley on the spot and then returning to New York with a final manuscript. Drew was surprised to find Murray Fisher also in residence and shocked to discover that the manuscript was far from complete—only about 70 percent of what would eventually comprise the book had been written. Drew worked in one room reading the manuscript while Haley wrote on the porch. He was writing the Chicken George portion of the book in longhand on a legal pad, and when he had written two or three pages, he gave them to a typist. When the typing was complete, Fisher edited the text. “Alex tends to overwrite a great deal,” Drew later said. “He had a lot in his head, and he was putting down everything in it.” Fisher cut, tightened sentences, moved material around, and then gave the pages back to the typist, who produced a new draft. Drew then read Fisher’s edits and made more suggestions, and the manuscript was typed again. Drew thought Fisher’s edits were beneficial.38

  At the end of the first day, Drew asked Haley for a few minutes to go over her edits, and when she left him to read more, Fisher came to Drew and ordered her not to talk directly to Haley. All her comments should go first to him, Fisher said, and he would pass them on to Alex. Furious at his high-handedness, Drew said she would deal with Haley as she saw fit. When she asked Haley if he knew about Fisher’s behavior, he replied that he did not and that Drew should come directly to him whenever necessary. Drew and Fisher kept their distance from each other from then on, until Drew was leaving to return to New York, at which point Fisher gave her a set of pages—only the first third of the manuscript. She turned to the title page and saw “Roots, by Alex Haley and Murray Fisher.” Drew told Haley that dual authorship was not acceptable. Haley and Fisher had a bitter argument, and Haley told Fisher to leave. Haley told Reynolds that all had gone well among the three of them and that the manuscript would be finished by July 15. He wanted people in New York to believe that he was enjoying smooth sailing toward the completion of the book. In late September he had still not completed the Chicken George chapters, seventeen in all, or about 150 pages of manuscript. But he promised that they would be submitted soon and that in the next six weeks he would push to the end of “Roots.” Throughout the entire writing process, this was the only promise of a delivery date that he kept.39

  In early October 1975 Fisher met with Haley and Stan Margolies, producer of the television series. Fisher interrupted each time Margolies asked Haley a question about the story. Haley angrily left the meeting and informed Fisher that he would finish “Roots” without his help. They were almost opposite personalities, Haley said; Fisher relished conflict and admitted his “private disdain for people who don’t meet [you] in confrontations. . . . You all but personify intransigence. . . . Once the manuscript’s in your hands, who dares intrude?” Haley despised “any unnecessary confrontations—as I think most are.” Haley was angry that Fisher had told Lisa Drew “to keep secret” what she saw in Jamaica, meaning Fisher’s heavy involvement in the manuscript’s formation. Such a comment, “dropped, seeded, in enough places,” could become “the sort of titillating tidbit that can outgrow weeds and outlast dye,” and “in time it’s heard in cocktail parties in Idaho, ‘Look, I happen to know he didn’t really write it—.’” On the lecture trail he had been asked regularly if it was not true that a white man had actually written The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Haley had been sensitive to gossip about himself since cocktail-party chatter in New York in the 1960s about his failure to get articles published in Reader’s Digest had gotten back to him. Haley acknowledged that Fisher had greater abilities than he did. Haley said that he himself researched good stories and that “I’m an innate[ly] good story-teller; an adequate author.” Maybe he and Fisher could work together in the future, but for the time being they were through.40

  Nine days later Haley wrote Fisher a letter of reconciliation. Blacks had had many generations to study whites, but whites, he thought, got thin-skinned if they were examined. “Roots” aspired to prove that blacks belonged in the mainstream of society, and if that was accomplished, Haley would come under public examination. “I have got to be able to stand under the spotlight of the scrutiny that will come,” he wrote. Fisher, Haley asserted, knew how American society worked on celebrities as they reached the higher rungs of fame: it found ways to “diminish, discredit them back down to size, as if to prove they really hadn’t belonged all the way up there.” Haley suspected that Fisher had “this discrediting, diminishing potential.” There were two ways that black celebrities were brought down: they were found to have been rule- or lawbreakers at some point in their backgrounds or they were somehow found to be controlled by white people. Fisher had to help Haley guard against both kinds of attack. Black critics would demand to know why he relied on Fisher. Didn’t he know any black editors? At the end of the long letter, he asked Fisher to return in early November to Jamaica, where, together, they would hammer out the last chapters about Tom Murray during the Civil War and Reconstruction.41

  The two worked well together from then until the end. Haley now also had the help of Myran Lewis, a graduate student at Ohio State University who was writing a biography of Harriet Tubman. Twenty-six-year-old My was living with Haley and typing the manuscript in exchange for Haley’s promise to help her with her book. Haley told Fisher, “This is a very ‘heavy’ girl, as the saying goes”—meaning that she was accomplished educationally—but she was also “diminutive, black, cute, quiet, sensitive, very, very sharp.” Lewis typed 120 words per minute and proofread as she went, but she had an even more active role in composing the book’s ending. Each morning she rose early, while Haley was still in bed, and sketched out dialogue and details to be added to the text. Her additions were the foundations of scenes in the book, enabling character development. Asked later if she deserved to be named as co-author, she replied, “Alex was 30 years older than me. I had such hero worship going. I couldn’t imagine being on the same page with somebody like Alex Haley.” She would become the
third Mrs. Alex Haley.42

  * * *

  At long last, Haley’s financial situation was changing for the better. In October 1975 Wolper had made a payment of $250,000 to Haley for the television series. Haley submitted his final draft of “Roots” to Doubleday in early December, more than eleven years after he had signed a contract for the book. When Roots came out, Haley generously acknowledged Murray Fisher. Haley had solicited Fisher’s help to structure the book from “a seeming impassable maze of researched materials.” Together they established a pattern of chapters and developed the story line. “Finally, in the book’s pressurized completion phase, he even drafted some of Roots’ scenes,” Haley wrote, “and his brilliant editing pen steadily tightened the book’s great length.” It was a generous and accurate tribute.43

  8

  The Black Family Bible

  Lisa Drew handed Haley the copyedited manuscript of Roots on January 23, 1976. Promising to return it with the editor’s queries answered a week later, Haley left with the manuscript and settled into the Commodore Hotel in New York, where in the next two weeks he rewrote the last 183 pages. When he returned the manuscript, it was misplaced in the Doubleday building for a few days. The delay was long enough that the now frantic Lisa Drew did not let Haley see the galley proofs: “I was frankly frightened of risking having him rewrite any more at that point.” Doubleday was working to get the book out several months before the airing of the Roots television series, which, to great relief at Doubleday, was soon postponed until early 1977. This meant that that Haley could travel to promote the book in the fall of 1976.1

  Though Roots was advertised as a book that covered seven generations of Haley’s family, it turned out to be far more about slavery than it was about freedom. Over his long years of writing the book, Haley’s dominant concern was establishing his African past. He saw that as his greatest contribution to black American history. The book’s focus also reflected the disproportionate time he had spent on researching and writing about the African and Middle Passage experiences. By the time he got to writing about the family members born after Chicken George’s time—the last four generations—he had to hammer out the remainder in about two months. The ending feels rushed, because the writing of it was rushed. Haley planned to dwell on his family’s post–Civil War experience in a separate book.2

  Haley’s attachment to Kunta Kinte overwhelms his interest in other characters and dominates the book. He devoted years of research to creating an idyllic origin for his family in the unspoiled African environment. Kunta’s mother, Binta, and father, Omoro, are perfect parents—well born, wise, and loving—symbols for the original natal family of every black American. Kunta is the African hero, fearless at every turn, until he chooses a peaceful life on the plantation over futile and probably fatal rebellion. He contradicts in every way the archetype of Sambo that Stanley Elkins had presented and that had gained so much attention in the 1960s.

  Kunta was the second great hero Haley had created on the page. Kunta and Malcolm X both were examples of fierce, independent, and manly characters, and together they formed a new and cherished archetype for black Americans—and, indeed, for many whites. Haley grappled with issues of identity in writing about Malcolm and then Kunta, and the two may have been proxies, on a subconscious level, for the existential struggles of Haley’s own life. The autobiographical impulse takes over Roots at the end, when Haley narrates his visit to Juffure.3

  Though the book flows gracefully for at least the first half, Haley frequently tried to tell the reader too much. He relied on slaves’ speeches in dialect to narrate the history of race in American history. Their conversations delivered background information on a variety of important historical topics—the death of a president, the invention of the cotton gin—but the means by which slaves acquired knowledge was not always clear, or it was relayed through means that seem contrived. Haley had gathered a vast amount of historical knowledge, and he did not always resist the impulse to show what he knew.

  Roots emphasized the patriarchal authority in Haley’s family. Each main male character—Kunta, Chicken George, Tom Murray, Will Palmer, Simon Haley, and Alex—directed the action in the narrative more than the women. Haley’s men were proud of their heritage and high social standing. They understood how society worked and acquired skills and, some of them, education. Among the women, only Kunta’s American-born daughter, Kizzy, emerged as a multidimensional character, but once her master raped her, the book’s focus shifted to her son, George. Bell, Kizzy, and Cynthia Palmer had crucial roles in keeping the family stories, but so did the men. The other female characters operated mostly as props for strong, decisive male characters. As Haley portrayed them, slave women in the United States were overly absorbed with whites’ lives and passive about slaves’ interests, while the men took responsibility for lifting the race.4

  Haley’s portrayal of slave women as passive stands out because it contradicts much of the writing about American slavery since Roots. It also opposed the image of slave women that came down from slave narratives. It may have been that the particular pieces of evidence Haley encountered led him in that direction. But because Roots was so much a product of his imagination, it had to have resulted to some extent from his own attitude toward women. Notwithstanding his lifelong appreciation for his grandmother and others among his older female kin, he doubted his natal mother’s affection for him, and he knew his stepmother did not like him. He had gone through two marriages that ended in protracted and bitter divorces. If time spent with his daughters is an indication, he appears not to have been strongly attached to them. He was charming to women with whom he worked, but he seemed to respect more the views of male colleagues. He spoke proudly of his father, Simon, his brother George, and his colleagues in the publishing business. He admired the integrity of Malcolm X. Did personal or psychological instincts about women shape his interpretations of the past? The evidence is only suggestive.

  But there is no doubt that Haley was determined to develop the theme of the strength of black families. He suggested that over the generations, his family had turned chaos into order, lack of education into accomplishment, and trauma into triumph. Each generation accomplished something vital to the survival of the family. Roots captured black slave families’ vulnerability under the constant threat of being sold away from one another, but Haley also showed those families’ resilience. Kizzy was sold away from her parents, but in her new dwelling, older slaves who had also been robbed of family members created a nurturing community for her to find solace. Kizzy’s son, Chicken George, was separated from his family for many years but still managed to lead his children through war and Emancipation and, ultimately, to some security in Tennessee. As a family story, Roots has a happy ending, and that accounted for much of its popularity.5

  Haley’s portrayal of patriarchal power in a black family appealed to many blacks because of a decade-long debate about the plight of black families in the United States. In 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then assistant secretary of labor in the Johnson administration, had prepared a report on black poverty in which he suggested that, despite the great gains of the civil rights movement, African Americans as a group were not progressing economically. In The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, Moynihan wrote that the “the Negro family, battered and harassed by discrimination, injustice, and uprooting, is in the deepest trouble.” A black child was eight times more likely than a white to be born out of wedlock; the number of black children supported by welfare was rising rapidly, black male unemployment was going up, and there were three times as many female-headed households among blacks as whites. Moynihan listed the historical circumstances—slavery, white supremacy, migration to cities—that accounted for the differences, but still he characterized the black family as a “tangle of pathology capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world.” He observed that black men had been emasculated, which Haley contr
adicted with his creation of strong male characters. A white psychologist spoke for many activists and academics when he denounced Moynihan for “blaming the victim.” Moynihan said privately, “Obviously one can no longer address oneself to the subject of the Negro family.”6 But, in fact, that was what Alex Haley had done—addressed himself to the black family—with a compelling account of family strength and survival.

  At exactly the same time that Roots appeared, Herbert G. Gutman of the City University of New York answered the Moynihan report with The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925, which argued that, while black families did not mirror the structure of white families, they had remained intact through slavery and Emancipation and into the first generation of migration to northern cities. The family was the slaves’ salvation through those terrible times. The breakdown that Moynihan described occurred after blacks had been oppressed in urban ghettos for two generations.

  Gutman’s work was part of a fundamental reinterpretation of American slavery taking place during the last years of Haley’s writing of Roots. In 1972 John Blassingame of Yale University published The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, which argued that historians of slavery had depended too much on the records of planters to depict slaves’ lives. Blassingame used slave narratives to create a portrait of insulated and self-affirming slave communities. He also acknowledged the importance of the family to slaves. “However frequently the family was broken it was primarily responsible for the slave’s ability to survive on the plantation without becoming totally dependent on and submissive to his master.”7 In 1974 Eugene Genovese of the University of Rochester also relied heavily on black sources to create Roll, Jordan, Roll, a study that placed heavy emphasis on the sustaining power of slave religion. Genovese concluded that slaves were active in pressing for their own well-being.