The Books That Mattered

by Frye Gaillard

  As I began to work on the project, the writer I thought about most was Alex Haley, the author of Roots, that iconic account of another family’s journey. I don’t mean to say that I ever thought I could equal Haley’s feat. But I did find a measure of inspiration in what he had left us, in the way he embodied as fully as any writer I know that universal need to know where we came from—to connect our own story to something even larger, and thus to enrich it. That was the remarkable thing about Roots. In lesser hands it could have been an African American story and nothing more, and there would have been no shame in that. It was important enough for later generations who may have pushed it aside to learn the story of the middle passage, when the newly kidnapped slaves-to-be lived for months in the darkened hold of a ship, shackled and chained and tossed by the waves, stacked together on coarse wooden shelves, where they could not stand up, where they ate rancid food and often lay in their own waste until, inevitably, some died.

  It would have been enough to relearn all of that. But Haley was concerned with something more universal, that tender connective tissue of family that came to him in the form of his grandmother’s stories. Since the 1700s, they had been handed down dutifully across the generations, these memories of “The African” who hated his captivity so much that he tried four different times to escape; who had been seized from his native forest while chopping wood to make a drum, and when he tried to run away in America, his captors eventually cut off his foot. His new owner gave him the name of Toby, but he told the other slaves his name was “Kintay,” and he pointed to the river that flowed nearby and uttered the words “Kamby Bolongo.” All these things Alex Haley knew because his grandmother told him, and there were many times as a boy, and later as a man, when he tried to imagine this proud ancestor and the place he came from—his ebony blackness and the African forest—but was there really any way to know?

  His determination to search for an answer crystallized at an unexpected moment. He was on a magazine assignment in London, having just finished writing The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a book that brought him his first taste of fame. He had spent a year interviewing the black nationalist leader and another year writing in Malcolm’s words—a subtle and delicate journalistic assignment that in the end produced a book of high drama. With remarkable candor Malcolm related, and Haley shaped, the story of one black leader’s evolution from street hustler to ascetic Black Muslim and eventually to a radical belief, despite his earlier professions to the contrary, in the possibility of racial reconciliation.

  As Malcolm had predicted, he did not live to see the book published. On February 21, 1965, he was assassinated in Harlem, gunned down by followers of Elijah Muhammad, the Black Muslim leader with whom he had broken. Haley was distraught. He had come to regard Malcolm X as a friend, but in the end he knew there was nothing to do but move on. On his trip to London, he deliberately immersed himself in history, another time, another place, and on one of his stops at the British Museum, he found himself staring at the Rosetta Stone. Before that moment he had known of its existence, but only vaguely, and now here it was, a flat piece of rock from the Nile River Delta with three separate texts chiseled on its face. One text was in Greek, another in an unknown tongue, and the third in ancient hieroglyphics. Haley learned that a French scholar named Jean Champollion had successfully correlated the texts, beginning with the Greek—the known—and matching it character by character with the others.

  On the plane ride back to the United States, Haley began to wonder if he, too, might be able to begin with the known—the sounds and the stories handed down across the years—and locate the origins of his family. For so many African Americans, he knew, the link to the past had been wiped out; really it was true for other people as well, but the Rosetta Stone analogy intrigued him. Could he begin with the family’s oral history, bits and pieces of the past so lovingly preserved, and discover something new?

  The idea soon became an obsession. He found a linguist at the University of Wisconsin who told him that the snippets of his ancestor’s language appeared to be from the Mandinka tongue. The word “bolongo,” he said, meant river; and “Kamby Bolongo,” might well mean the Gambia River which flowed through an area where the language was spoken. Soon afterward, on a speaking trip to New York, Haley met Ebou Manga, a young college student who came from The Gambia, a West African country that took its name from the river. Manga became so intrigued by Haley’s quest that he offered to go with him to The Gambia and see what the two of them could find.

  On that trip Haley discovered that his African ancestor’s name, Kintay—traditionally and properly spelled Kinte—belonged to a prominent family in The Gambia, and Haley soon found himself on a boat, headed upstream on the Gambia River to speak with one of the village griots. These were tribal elders trained in the art of memory, entrusted with the task of keeping the tribal history alive, of preserving old knowledge in the hearts of the living. When Haley came at last to the village of Jaffure, this was his description in Roots of his quite remarkable encounter with the griot:

  The old man sat down, facing me, as the people hurriedly gathered behind him. Then he began to recite for me the ancestral history of the Kinte clan, as it had been passed along orally down across the centuries from the forefathers’ time. It was not merely conversational, but more as if a scroll were being read; for the still, silent villagers, it was clearly a formal occasion.

  For nearly two hours the griot spoke, adding a particular detail here or there, some fact about a person being named, until at last he came to Omoro Kinte, who had four sons. “About the time the King’s soldiers came,” the griot declared, “the oldest of these four sons, Kunta, went away from his village to chop wood . . . and he was never seen again.” Haley was stunned, for he knew that according to his grandmother’s stories, their ancestor had been seized—carried away into slavery—while he was chopping wood to make a drum. Could this really be the same man? Despite the tantalizing power of the moment Haley knew he was still operating in the realm of oral history, and his western mind wanted further proof.

  He soon made another visit to London, and after two weeks of needle-in-the-haystack research, he discovered that in 1767 a British military unit had been sent from London to guard a slave fort on the Gambia River. Could this be when “the King’s soldiers came”? Seven more weeks of poring through musty maritime records, and Haley discovered that on July 5, 1767, a British slave ship called Lord Ligonier had sailed from The Gambia to Annapolis, Maryland, the port to which his ancestor had come. He knew that much from his grandmother’s stories. She had also told him that after the African’s fourth attempt at escape, when the slave hunters had cut off his foot, he became the property of Dr. William Waller, who named him Toby. In Richmond, Virginia, Haley found the deed, a fraying paper dated September 5, 1768, giving Waller title to “one Negro man slave named Toby.”

  “My God!” Haley wrote in Roots. At last his journey of discovery was over. He still had a whole book to write, of course, but now he was sure that all of the old stories were true. He continued his study of the more general history, the dismal realities of the slave trade and of slavery itself, and through it all he developed a kind of composite understanding of his ancestor, Kunta Kinte. Part of it was what he knew to be true, and the rest of it was what he imagined; a literary form that some critics called faction. Some have criticized Haley for that, for a book in which the reader is left uncertain about what is really true and what isn’t. There have also been professional genealogists who questioned his research, and an author who accused him of plagiarism, but despite the taint of those accusations the power of Haley’s work—for me, at least—is still undeniable. Following its publication in 1976, Roots won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, and the following year the Roots miniseries won an Emmy.

  And for people lucky enough to know him, there was the direct inspiration of Haley himself. I met him only once, in 1988, but even today one of
my prized literary possessions is a copy of Roots inscribed quite warmly to my wife and me: “To Frye and Nancy—Love! Alex Haley.” The occasion on which I acquired that inscription was a banquet in honor of a mutual friend, Dr. C. Eric Lincoln, one of the great black scholars of the twentieth century. Both Haley and Lincoln had written extensively about Malcolm X and had developed a bond of mutual admiration. In 1988, as Lincoln was completing a fine Southern novel called The Avenue, Clayton City, Haley read the manuscript for him and sent him a cryptic note of affirmation: “C. Eric, you can write your ass off! Ain’t nothing wrong with this manuscript except that you wrote it instead of me.”

  As it happened, I was writing a profile of Lincoln not long after that letter arrived, and we talked at length about The Avenue, Clayton City, and about Alex Haley, and about Dr. Lincoln’s north Alabama boyhood that had deeply influenced his writing and his life. He had come of age in the cotton country near the town of Athens, raised by his grandparents, Less and Mattie Lincoln, who had taught him to “respect everybody respectable.” That included whites as well as blacks, and many of the whites Lincoln knew growing up tended to treat him decently enough. But there was one exception. On a late Autumn day, probably in 1937 when Lincoln was a boy of thirteen, he carried a forty-pound bag of cotton to the local gin. He was proud of the fact that at nine cents a pound that would mean $3.60 for his family, and he was startled, therefore, when the cotton gin owner—a white man—casually flipped him a quarter.

  “Mr. Beasley,” Eric said softly, “I think you made a mistake.”

  Beasley’s face turned red and he got up abruptly and bolted the door. At first the boy was merely puzzled, but he suddenly found himself sprawled on the floor, gasping for breath from a blow to his midsection, as Beasley began to kick him and stomp on his head. “He was in a frenzy,” Lincoln remembered, “and I’ll never forget his words: ‘Nigger, as long as you live, don’t you never try to count behind no white man again.”

  As Lincoln told the story in 1988, his large, dark eyes welled over with tears, and for both of us, I think, it was an unexpected moment of intimacy that cemented a friendship lasting until Lincoln’s death. Later that year when he won the Lillian Smith Award for Southern fiction, he asked me to come to the awards banquet and to share the head table with Alex Haley, who was there to make a talk in his honor. Awed of course by the august company, I was soon put at ease by Haley’s amiability and warmth, and by what seemed to be his genuine interest in what I was writing. I told him a little about my grandfather’s stories and about the cardboard box I had found in his attic—that dusty collection of old family letters—and I told him also about Robert Croshon, who had worked for my family for more than sixty years. Robert was a gardener, an African American man of gentle dignity, who was also a fine storyteller. He told his own family, and later told me, about Gilbert Fields, his great-grandfather, who was born in Africa and later enslaved. Apparently a proud and restless man, Fields fled from his Georgia plantation one night with his wife, two daughters, and a granddaughter. They intended to follow the Big Dipper north, but a sudden thunderstorm came up, blotting out the stars, and in the confusion that followed the family headed south. They came to a cave near the Alabama line where another runaway was living underground. He took them in, told them they could stay, but they headed south instead to Mobile, where they quietly entered its community of free Negroes.

  I told all this to Alex Haley, who firmly replied: “You have to write that.” And so I did.

  II

  When I think about the legacy of Alex Haley and his odyssey in search of his roots, my mind often jumps to the work of Rick Bragg—one of the most gifted nonfiction writers in the South. Bragg is a former newspaper man who honed his craft to a Pulitzer Prize-winning edge before setting off to write best sellers. He is known today for a fiercely affectionate trilogy about his family—one book about his mother, another about fatherhood, and in between there was Ava’s Man, the story of his grandfather, Charlie Bundrum, a hard-living son of the Southern foothills, renowned in the family for his great and tender heart. Bundrum died a year before his grandson was born (“I’ve never forgiven him for that,” Bragg wrote), and in trying to reconstruct the pieces of his life, Bragg, like a lot of us, thought about Haley.

  “Roots was an eye-opening book for me and for a lot of Southerners,” he said. “If it were not for oral histories there would have been no books from me at all. I sat for days and days and just listened to my people talk, about killings and shootings and stabbings and fistfights, and about running off to get married, or just running off, and about jail, and bad police, and commodity cheese, and drunks, and all of it. I learned how they felt about each other, what they feared, and what they dreamed about.”

  Bragg set out to write it down, a different dimension of the great Southern story—the memories of white people who grew up poor and often stayed that way; people who loved to tell a good story, but until fairly recently wouldn’t put it to paper. Maybe they didn’t know how to write, or maybe they had other things on their minds, like scratching out a living from the soil or the mills, or maybe they just thought the stories were enough. But sometime around the middle of the twentieth century, a new generation came along, writers as passionate as any I’ve read. There was Tim McLaurin from North Carolina, an alcoholic former Peace Corps volunteer and Marine Corps veteran who loved to get drunk and pick up snakes, and who wrote a novel called Cured by Fire—the tragic story of two homeless men, one white, one black, who form a friendship across the divide. And there was also Harry Crews, a white sharecropper’s son from southern Georgia, whose novels are full of crazy people and freaks, and who also wrote a haunting memoir about his own growing up, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. This is how Crews began that story:

  My first memory is of a time ten years before I was born, and the memory takes place where I have never been and involves my daddy whom I never knew. It was the middle of the night in the Everglades swamp in 1925, when my daddy woke his best friend Cecil out of a deep sleep in the bunkhouse just south of the floating dredge that was slowly chewing its way across the Florida Peninsula . . . The night was dark as only a swamp can be dark and they could not see each other there in the bunkhouse. The rhythmic stroke of the dredge’s engine came counterpoint to my daddy’s shaky voice as he told Cecil what was wrong.

  When Cecil finally did speak, he said: “I hope it was good, boy. I sho do.”

  “What was good?”

  “That Indian. You got the clap.”

  Such is the literary tradition out of which Bragg came by way of a stop at the New York Times. That was where I first encountered his work, and I’ll never forget his lead on a story about the Oklahoma City bombing. He was part of the team of Times reporters sent to Oklahoma on April 19, 1995, after a fanatic by the name of Timothy McVeigh filled a Ryder truck with five thousand pounds of fertilizer—ammonium nitrate—and lit the fuse. The explosion killed one hundred and sixty-eight people, including children at a daycare center, and what can anyone say in such a moment? Can a reporter really find the words? Maybe not, but this is how Bragg wrote it:

  Before the dust and the rage had a chance to settle, a chilly rain started to fall on the blasted-out wreck of what had once been an office building, and on the shoulders of the small army of police, firefighters and medical technicians that surrounded it. They were not used to this, if anyone is. On any other day, they would have answered calls to kitchen fires, domestic disputes, or even a cat up a tree . . .“We’re just a little old cowtown,” said Bill Finn, a grime-covered firefighter who propped himself wearily against a brick wall as the rain turned the dust to mud on his face. “You can’t get no more Middle America than Oklahoma City . . .”

  As the Times coverage continued to unfold, I thought it was literature on deadline, for it’s always been a role of good writing to turn tragedy into something akin to beauty, and thus make it bearable. But it was also clear
that in Bragg’s accounts were the obvious seeds of a larger possibility—of stretching out as a writer and telling a story that would fill up a book. And sure enough, the first one came in 1999. He called it All Over but the Shoutin’ and it was a story about his mama. What Bragg delivered his first time out was a portrait of suffering, love, and sacrifice, and he did it in the style of a fine feature writer, writing with emotion that he wore on his sleeve, but sensing deftly when to rein it in.

  “All Over but the Shoutin’ is a work of art,” wrote Pat Conroy after reading the book. “I never met Rick Bragg in my life, but I called him up and told him he’d written a masterpiece, and I sent flowers to his mother.”

  Such effusive praise was not at all uncommon, and Bragg was suddenly a literary star. But what exactly could he do for an encore? The answer turned out to be Ava’s Man, a book I thought was equally impressive, for Bragg this time was writing about a person he never knew, piecing together his grandfather’s character from family recollections, some of which were offered with reluctance. It was not, he discovered, that people felt the need to protect Charlie Bundrum, not that they were ashamed, but rather that more than forty years after his death, the memory of it was too much to bear. “After Daddy died,” Rick’s mother told him, “it was like there was nothing.”