Alex Haley
Page 24
Nobile rounded up many of Haley’s detractors. Margaret Walker called the deceased writer a “hack.” Even the words of Haley’s best friends were used for character assassination. John Hawkins, Haley’s literary agent after Paul Reynolds retired, told Nobile that “Alex was a man with many compartments and nobody knew them all,” sort of “a literary Kim Philby.” Extending that analogy, Nobile wrote: “Like a master spy, Haley could persuasively lie about anything.” He quoted Haley’s oldest friends as saying things that implied dishonesty on the part of the writer. George Sims, embittered over the disposition of Haley’s estate when Nobile talked to him, said, “Alex didn’t know 10 blacks or 10 whites in Henning. I was there for 18 years and he was there for 18 months. Those were my stories, but Alex could tell them better.”
Some of Nobile’s accusations were misleading or simply incorrect. He wrote that Haley had copied eighty-one pages of Courlander’s book when in fact Courander alleged that eighty-one passages had been copied. Most of the allegations were simply not convincing. Nobile reported from a secondhand source, for example, that Haley had said Margaret Walker Alexander might have won her suit if she had had a better lawyer than her son. It is doubtful that Haley said it, but if he did, he was clearly wrong. Haley’s lawyer, George Berger, later said that Walker would not have prevailed before Judge Frankel if “Oliver Wendell Holmes had been her lawyer.” Nobile dismissed as a lie the claim that Haley had slept in the hold of the African Star on his way from Dakar to Florida in 1973, basing the accusation on a sailor’s insistence that Haley could not have done so because of the noxious cocoa beans in the hold. But in fact Haley had made that trip on the African Star two years earlier, and Nobile had no information about what was in the hold of the ship then.
Nobile ended his article with a long quote from an interview that Haley gave near the end of his life to Charles Thomas Galbraith, a New York genealogist and originally a Haley admirer. Haley admitted to Galbraith that he had made errors in Roots and, by way of explanation for not admitting or correcting them earlier, said: “The quest for the symbolic history of a people, just swept me like a twig atop a rushing water.” Then he made an unfortunate change of metaphor. “I guess it was sort of like riding a tiger . . . you always remember, you ride this tiger and the crowds [are] cheering, [you] always remember if you fall off the tiger, you’s eaten.”21
But Nobile did not elicit the outrage he seemed to expect. His article got only a brief mention in the New York Times, and while it was the basis for a British Broadcasting Corporation documentary exposé, the BBC never got the film shown on American television. Today that film is a lost artifact, not found in American research repositories. Millions of Americans had been educated and moved emotionally by Roots, and they simply may not have wanted the work’s meaning destroyed by a character assassination.
By 2002 Nobile had moved into unconstrained ad hominem attack mode. On the website History News Network, read widely by professional and lay historians, Nobile wrote a snarky public letter in the guise of Haley to Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose, two historians who had been accused of plagiarism. “Don’t worry, be happy,” Nobile wrote. “There is life after literary disgrace. Look at me. They nailed me for copying the main plot and character for Roots from Harold Courlander’s slave novel . . . and for fabricating a family tree stretching back to 18th century Gambia. (Luckily, nobody found out that I relied on a well-paid white-ghostwriter, too, the same one who secretly revised The Autobiography of Malcolm X.)”22
By 2000 the neglect of Nobile’s exposé had become fodder in the culture wars, allegedly an example of political correctness among the liberal elite to protect a miscreant black writer. The failure to “get” Haley was offered as evidence that liberal intelligentsia had little regard for historical truth or honesty. In 2002, when NBC broadcast a twenty-fifth anniversary retrospective on Roots, Stanley Crouch, a black cultural critic, wrote that the truth about Roots was still ignored because blacks were “obsessed with being a ‘lost’ people in America. . . . Younger black people were told they were not Americans, but victims of Americanism.” Roots, he wrote, was an “insult to black people, and no amount of excuses will change that harsh fact.” Crouch’s view did not represent those of many blacks, but a strong and growing contingent of American conservatives liked hearing such criticism from an important black intellectual. A 2005 book, Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture, relied mostly on Nobile to assign Haley much responsibility for Afrocentrism and to link him to “the myriad lies and half-truths that America’s progressive elite has used to hijack an entire culture.”23
* * *
Nobile’s attack mattered in weighing the historical significance of Haley, because it narrowed the range of assessment. Loud accusations of lying and theft have to be addressed before a more sober, fair, and balanced assessment can emerge. Nobile’s article registered with academics. He had caught Haley in misrepresentations of facts, and few professors countenanced that. The British literary scholar Helen Taylor used Nobiles’ critique in her fair-minded 1995 review of the work of “the griot from Tennessee.” Jan Vansina, the African historian who had helped Haley in 1967 and whom Haley referred to time and again as his authority on Mandinka language, quoted Nobile in his 1994 biography to the effect that Roots was “a willful fabrication” for personal advantage. In 1999 Haley’s Knoxville friend Richard Marius wrote the entry on Haley for the Tennessee Encyclopedia. He called Nobile’s article “measured” and “a devastating final shot” at Haley.24
It was easier to ignore Haley than to sort out the details of his alleged wrongs. Haley was all but left out of the creation of a canon of black American literature. When the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature, a work of almost three thousand pages covering hundreds of literary excerpts, appeared in 1997, no passage from Roots was included. “We didn’t exclude Alex Haley from the canon, he just didn’t make the cut,” said Henry Louis Gates Jr., editor of the anthology. “[There were] a lot of people who were good who just didn’t make the cut.”25
Gates and his advisers thus excluded a work that sold more than any other, that arguably touched the racial sensibilities of more Americans than any other, and that recast Americans’ popular understanding of slavery more than any other. This decision seems short-sighted at the very least, and probably reflected the influence of Nobile, although Gates denied such an influence. To another reporter, Gates admitted that “most of us feel it’s highly unlikely that Alex actually found the village from which his ancestors sprang. Roots is a work of the imagination rather than strict historical scholarship. It was an important event because it captured everyone’s imagination.” That accurate assessment of Haley’s work was perhaps justification for including it in the canon of African American letters, since all the works in the anthology were, after all, works of imagination. The anthology did include an excerpt from The Autobiography of Malcolm X (with the wrong publication date given), which carried only a brief mention that Haley had helped with the book. By then, virtually all students of black literature were crediting Haley with creating and preserving Malcolm’s story, even if they thought he had depicted Malcolm inaccurately in regard to some particulars.26
Ultimately Gates paid a silent tribute to Haley with a successful series of television programs on the genealogy of celebrities. In 2005 and 2006 he produced and hosted a miniseries, African American Lives. On that program, through historical evidence and DNA testing, the lineage of black celebrities—including Gates himself—was traced and revealed to those celebrities on camera, among them Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey, Quincy Jones, Tina Turner, Morgan Freeman, and Maya Angelou. The show was so popular that Gates returned in 2010 with another miniseries, Faces of America, which traced the genealogy of white celebrities of various ethnic backgrounds. Then, in 2012 and 2014, the series morphed into Finding Your Roots—with Henry Louis Gates Jr. It might have been Haley’s
fate to do the show, had he lived. It might never have emerged under the astute direction of Gates had Haley not done Roots. Haley was at least partly responsible for the ongoing exploration of Americans’ roots.
To be sure, Haley’s friends remembered him and his accomplishments. In 2007, on the thirtieth anniversary of the Roots miniseries, Reader’s Digest produced a slick, full-color book with a dozen selections of his pieces from the magazine. Haley had meant a lot to the Digest, and it to him, and the book was a tribute to his work and that relationship.27 In 2005 Al Martinez, a Los Angeles Times reporter, wrote an article entitled “He’s the Man That February Forgot.” Another Black History Month had passed without offering any accolades for Haley. “His fall from grace was abrupt and humiliating,” Martinez said. But the memory of Haley “shines brightly in my mind,” Martinez wrote, because they had “told stories together, but mostly, we shared each other’s company without demands or impositions.” Even after Haley became “a racial icon, he was the same self-effacing man I had always known. This distinguished him and, perhaps, also in a way diminished him. He wasn’t your average hero.”28
One tribute came from Haley’s old friend and traveling companion Lamar Alexander, who in 2013 was the United States senator responsible for organizing the second inauguration of Barack Obama as president. Speaking briefly in front of the U.S. Capitol, Alexander complimented the peaceful reaffirmation of Obama’s leadership, even as the senator knew that a large segment of whites in his home state freely expressed their hatred of the first black president. “The late Alex Haley, the author of ‘Roots,’ lived his life by these six words: ‘Find the good and praise it.’”
* * *
Alex Haley happened to rise to celebrity in America at a time when American popular culture was fascinated when heroes were knocked off their pedestals. In the 1980s Martin Luther King Jr. had been shown as a plagiarist in his sermons and his dissertation. John F. Kennedy’s womanizing was the subject of endless stories. Presidents Eisenhower and Franklin Roosevelt were posthumously taken to task for extramarital affairs, and longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover for bizarre private behavior. As Haley’s detractors knew, the rules of American celebrity dictated that, once a person came under scrutiny, he or his defenders fought an uphill battle to regain his standing. In Haley’s case, there was too little reflection about whether the allegations were as bad as some alleged, whether the punishment for wrongdoing fit the crime, or what, exactly, were the motives of the accuser.
The positive impact of Alex Haley’s writing on the thinking and attitudes of Americans was lost—lost, at least, on the popular media. If, however, one measures that impact by the tens of millions who have read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Roots, and the hundreds of millions who have seen the television and film renderings of those works, then Haley wrote the two most important works in black culture in the twentieth century. More than any other writer, he changed the way the masses of Americans understood the black experience. He gave whites a compelling reminder of the ugliness of racial exploitation and blacks a sense of ownership of their past, with all its travails but also its triumphs. His work was a great contribution to American culture and race relations, and it deserves to be remembered.
Note Abbreviations
Frequently Cited Sources
AHPAlex Haley Papers, University of Tennessee Libraries, Special Collections
ARCAnne Romaine Collection, University of Tennessee Libraries, Special Collections
MXC-SMalcolm X Collection, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library
KMPKen McCormick Papers, Container 44, Papers of Doubleday and Company, Library of Congress
Frequently Cited Works
MM, MXManning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Viking, 2011).
AMXThe Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Ballantine, 2003). Currently, this is the most widely available edition.
McCauleyMary Siebert McCauley, “Alex Haley, a Southern Griot: A Literary Biography” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, George Peabody College of Vanderbilt University, 1983).
Frequently Cited Names in the Notes
AHAlex Haley
ARAnne Romaine
MXMalcolm X
PRPaul Revere Reynolds Jr.
Notes
Please note that some of the links referenced in this work are no longer active.
Chapter 1: Grandma’s Boy
1.Unless otherwise cited, the information on the Palmer and Haley family in this chapter is drawn from the many interviews that Alex Haley gave in the 1960s and 1970s and from his various autobiographical works, only some of which were published but all of which can be found in his papers at the University of Tennessee’s Special Collections. Alex and George Haley gave lengthy interviews to researchers. See especially Anne Romaine interviews of Alex and George Haley, Anne Romaine Papers, University of Tennessee Library Special Collections, MS 2828, box 1, folders 1, 2, 7, and 8. See also Mary Seibert McCauley, “Alex Haley, a Southern Griot: A Literary Biography” (unpublished PhD dissertation, George Peabody College of Vanderbilt University, 1983). This work contains long quotes from McCauley’s interviews of Alex Haley. The author interviewed George Haley on May 11, 2014.
2.Transcript, Haley “Roots” lecture, n.p., AHP, MS 1888, box 30, folder 18.
3.Search for Roots manuscript, AHP, MS 1888, box 34, folder 55.
4.Alabama A&M Reports, 1932–34, Alabama A&M University Archives, Normal, Alabama.
5.Charles S. Johnson, Shadow of the Plantation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934).
6.George Haley, interview by AR, ARC, MS 2032, box 2, folder 34.
7.Donald Bogle, Blacks in American Films and Television: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland, 1988), 295.
Chapter 2: The Cook Who Writes
1.Roy Byrd, interview by AR, March 10, 1993, handwritten notes, ARC, MS 2032, box 2, folder 26.
2.Logan Lannon, interview by AR, February 3, 1993, handwritten notes, ARC, MS 2032, box 2, folder 26.
3.AR, “Alex Haley Notes,” 1991, ARC, MS 2032, box 4.
4.George Webb, interview by AR, January 21, 1993, handwritten notes, ARC, MS 2032, box 2, folder 26.
5.AR, “Alex Haley Notes,” 1991, ARC, MS 2032, box 4; “Roots II” file, AHP, MS 1888, 38, 12.
6.AH, “Why I Remember,” Parade, December 1, 1991.
7.Nan Haley, interview by AR, February 22, 1992, ARC, MS 2828, box 1, folder 6.
8.AH, “The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Met,” Reader’s Digest, March 1961, 73–77.
9.The Seafarer, vol. 1, no. 17, February 1944, ARC, MS 2828, box 2, folder 19.
10.The Seafarer, vol. 1, no. 9, n.d. (but probably late 1943), ARC, MS 2828, box 2, folder 19.
11.Byrd, interview by AR.
12.Ibid.
13.New York Times, May 21, 1950; Kenneth Black, interview by AR, February 20, 1993, handwritten notes, ARC, MS 2032, box 2, folder 26.
14.New York Post, August 2, 1943; Dominic J. Capeci Jr., The Harlem Riot of 1943 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977).
15.MM, MX, 108.
16.Horace R. Cayton, “Fighting for White Folks?” Nation, September 26, 1942.
17.“Roots II” file, AHP, MS 1888, box 38, folder 12.
18.Ibid.
19.James Playsted Wood, Magazines in the United States (New York: Ronald Press Company, 1956), 154, 222, 201.
20.Alex Haley: The Playboy Interviews, ed. Murray Fisher (New York: Ballantine, 1993), viii.
21.Notes, “The Lord and Little David,” AHP, MS 1888, box 9, folder 2.
22.Peggy Dowst Redman to AH, July 17, 1954; Maryse Rutledge to AH, January 22, 1954, both in AHP, MS 1888, box 9, folder 4.
&nb
sp; 23.John H. Johnson with Lerone Bennett, Jr., Succeeding Against the Odds (New York, 1989), 207,155–59.
24.John B. Mahan, interview by AR, March 14, 1993, handwritten notes, ARC, MS 2032, box 2, folder 26.
25.William Earle, interview by AR, March 1, 1993, handwritten notes, ARC, MS 2032, box 2, folder 26.
26.Barnaby Conrad, Name Dropping: Tales from my Barbary Coast Saloon (New York: HarperCollinsWest, 1994), 60–66.
27.Barnaby Conrad, interview by AR, n.d., ARC, MS 2032, box 2, folder 28; C. Eric Lincoln, interview by AR, April 21, 1993, ARC, 3041, 2, 1; Nan Haley, interview by AR, February 22, 1992, ARC, MS 2828, box 1, folder 6.
Chapter 3: People on the Way Up
1.Nan Haley, interview by AR, February 22, 1992, ARC, MS 2828, box 1, folder 6.
2.Haley diary entry, July 12, 1963, AHP MS 1888, box 19, folder 8. Fella apparently had sex with an underage girl. At the time he was sixteen years old. It is not clear whether it was the girl or her parents who accused him. Haley refers to the charge as one of statutory rape, but in 1962 the closest designation the New York Penal Code had to statutory rape was rape in the second degree, or sex with a girl under eighteen without force, coercion, or mental incapacity. The code makes no explicit provision for sex between minors. There is no evidence that what took place was forcible rape; nor is there evidence that it was not.
3.”Origins of Roots” manuscript, AHP, MS 1888, box 34, folder 8; Logan Lannon, interview by AR, February 3, 1993, handwritten notes, ARC, MS 2032, box 2, folder 26; McCauley, 46–8; Ronald Wells, interview by AR, March 8, 1993, handwritten notes, ARC, MS 2032, box 2, folder 26; Jeffrey Elliot, “The Roots of Alex Haley’s Writing career,” Writer’s Digest, August 1980.