Alex Haley (15 page)

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 find 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.”
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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.
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* * *

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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* * *

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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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* * *

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.
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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.”
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