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Alex Palmer Haley (1921-1992) |
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American biographer, scriptwriter, and novelist, whose most famous work is Roots, a publishing phenomenon and international bestseller. In this work, Alex Haley traced his ancestry back to Africa and covered seven American generations, starting from his ancestor, Kunta Kinte. The book was adapted to television series, and woke up an interest in genealogy, particularly among African-Americans. Haley himself once said, that the novel was not so much history as a study of mythmaking: "What Roots gets at in whatever form, is that it touches the pulse of how alike we human beings are when you get down to the bottom, beneath these man-imposed differences." Early in the spring of 1750, in the village of Juffure, four days upriver from the coast of The Gambia, West Africa, a manchild was born to Omoro and Binta Kinte. Forcing forth from Binta's strong young body, he was as black as she ws, flecked and slippery with Binta's blood, and he was bawling. The two wrinkled midwives, old Nyo Boto and the baby's Grandmother Yaisa, saw that it was a boy and laughed with joy. (from Roots by Alex Haley, Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1976, p. 1) Alex Haley was born in Ithaca, New York, the son of Simon Alexander Haley, a teacher, and the former Bertha George Palmer, also a teacher; she died when Alex was 10. Simon Haley, who was left with three children, remarried two years later one of his teaching colleagues, Zeona Hatcher. The family moved in 1921 to the small town of Henning, Tennessee. Alex lived there for five years. His grandfather Will owned the local lumber company. When he died of a heart attack, Haley's father left school temporarily and took over the business, which was on the brink of bankruptcy. After finishing his degree, he worked as a college teacher throughout the South. In Henning, Alex heard colorful stories told by his maternal grandmother, Cynthia Palmer, who traced the family genealogy to Haley's great-great-great-great-grandfather from the 18th century. He had always said he was an African, called "Kin-tay"; that he was brought by slave-ship to the New World and named Toby there. As Haley recalled: "The time would be just about as the dusk was deepening into the night, with the lightning bugs flickering on and off around the honeysuckle vines, and every evening I can remember, unless there was some local priority gossip, always they would talk about the same things—snatches and patches of what later I'd learn was the long, cumulative family narrative that had been passed down across the generations." (Roots: The Saga of an American Family, with a special introduction by Michael Eric Dyson and Alex Haley, Da Capo Press, 2014, p. 856) Haley did not excel at school or university. From 1937 to 1939, he studied at Elizabeth City Teachers College in North Carolina, but decided to quit. In 1941, he married Nannie Branch, whom he had met during one of his leaves on shore. They had two children. The marriage ended in divorce in 1964, and in the same year Haley married Juliette Collins; they had one daughter. After divorce in 1972, Haley married the former Myra Lewis, Ph.D. and a television script writer; she had been one of his researches on the Roots project. "I'm just not a stationary husband," Haley once confessed. At the time of his death, Haley was separared from her. During WW II, Haley enlisted in the Coast Guard as a messboy. He served first on the U.S.S. Murzin, a cargo-ammunition vessel, that sailed on the Southwest Pacific. To stave off the boredom, and getting a new rating – Chief Journalist, a public relations position, especially created for him – Haley started to write adventure stories. For his fellow sailors he composed love letters, which they sent to their girlfriends and wives; for officers he wrote speeches. Other writings Haley submitted for magazines for eight years and received countless rejection slips, before his first text was published. However, during these frustrating years he learned the basics of storytelling. Hailey's new station became New York City. In 1949, he sold three stories on the history of the Coast Guard to Coronet, a popular men's magazine. Abandoning plans to return to North Carolina, Haley decided to stay with the Coast Guard. In 1954, Hailey was transferred to San Francisco, where he first time heard of the charismatic young spokesperson Malcolm X, but they met five years later in Harlem, at the Temple Number Seven Restaurant, in the summer of 1959. At the age of 37, after twenty years of service, Haley left the
Coast Guard with the rank of Chief Journalist, and moved back to New
York to become a full-time writer. For a period he lived in a one-room
basement apartment in Greenwich Village, first trying to find a regular
job without much success, and then writing "16 to 18 hours a day for
seven days a week," as he recalled. His new friends included James
Baldwin, who cheered him up, and C. Eric Lincoln, author of The Black Muslims in America. Haley contributed to Reader's Digest biographical features, interviewed Miles Davis for Playboy, and gained the fame of being notoriously late on deadlines. Haley's "Playboy
Inteviews" also included conversations with such figures as Jim Brown,
Cassius Clay, Sammy Davis Jr., Quincy Jones, and Leontyne Price. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), Haley's first major work, was finished just two weeks before the shooting of the American revolutionary. The book had an immense effect on the black power movement in the United States. Before publishing it, Haley worked with the spokesman for the Nation of Islam (Black Muslim) movement, Malcolm X (Malcolm Little, 1925-1965), for nearly two years, one year writing the text. From their conversations he created the story of Malcolm X, told in his own words. For the sake of objectivity, Malcolm decided to rely on a non-Muslim writer. The book sold more than six million copies by 1977 in the United States and other countries. Haley: What motives do you impute to Playboy for providing you with this opportunity for the free discussion of your views? The autobiography depicts Malcolm X's experiences of racism in small
towns, racial violence, criminal life, and his imprisonment. "When my
mother was pregnant with me, she told me later, a party of hooded Ku
Klux Klan riders galloped up to our home in Omaha, Nebraska, one night.
Surrounding the house, brandishing their shotguns and rifles, they
shouted for my father to come out. My mother went to the front door and
opened it. Standing where they could see her pregnant condition, she
told them that she was alone with her three small children, and that my
father was away, preaching in Milwaukee." (The Autobiography of Malcolm X, with
the assistance of Alex Haley, foreword by Attallah Shabazz,
introduction by M. S. Handler, epilogue by Alex Haley, afterword by
Ossie Davis, New York: Ballantine Books, 1999, p. 1) Malcolm's belief that
he would not live to see the book proved to be correct: he was shot to
death shortly before it went to press. Black Muslims viewed white
people as a satanic force, but Malcolm X believed that orthodox Islam
contained universal principles of brotherhood, which rejected race as a
form of identity– with the exception of Jews. Haley censored a number
of Malcolm X's antisemitic statements about Jews in the book
manuscript. In the early 1960s, the Nation of Islam had been involved
with the American Nazi Party. Haley
said in a interview, that both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X
"died tragically at about the right time in terms of posterity. Both
men were at a point in their careers where they were beginning to
decline. They were under attack. People don't talk about it now and
many don't know it, but Dr. King had begun to be ridiculed, even within
his own immediate entourage. . . . He was having problems keeping his
thing together. Malcolm X, maybe even more graphically, had lost his
power base, which was the Nation of Islam. And Malcolm, I know, was
having rough time trying to keep things going." (quoted in Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times by Thomas Hauser, London : Robson, 2004, p. 508) In 1965, when Haley was going through post-Civil War records in
National Archives in Washington, D.C., he stumbled upon the names of
his maternal great-grandparents. During a trip to the British Museum in
London, he saw the famous Rosetta Stone, which had unlocked the secret
of the Egyptian hieroglyphs. The idea – to decipher a historic unknown
by matching it with that was known, initiated an odyssey that took 11
years and which is now part of literature history. Before Roots,
prominent African-American novelists had favourored subjects dealing
with contemporary life or recent history. Relying his family
tradition and research, Haley travelled to the village of Juffure, to
trace his own ancestor and to meet with a native griot, oral historian, who could name Haley's own ancestor, Kunta
Kinte. He was brought to America in 1767 on a ship called the Lord Ligonier. "From the time my book on Malcolm came out," Haley said in an interview, "I always had the capacity to earn minimum of $100,000 a year by writing articles and lecturing. But there were years when I didn't earn $10,00 because of my obsession with Roots." ('Alex Haley: The Man Behind Roots' by Hans J. Massaquoi, Ebony, April 1977) When the book appeared in 1976, it gained both critical and popular success, although the truth and originality of the work raised some doubts. James Baldwin concluded in his New York Times review, that the novel suggests how each of us are vehicle of the history which have produced us. On the other hand, representing a minority opinion Michael Arled dismissed the book and television series as Haley's own fantasies about "going home." Haley also faced a plagiarism suit – he had lifted material from Harold Courlander's novel The African (1967). The suit was settled out of court. Haley paid him $650,000 but maintained that he hadn't read the book and the material was relayed to him by researching friends. The story begins from Juffure, a small peaceful village in West Africa in 1750, and ends in
Gambia, in the same village, after several generations. However, Haley did not claim that
it is possible to return to some Paradise, but depicted realistically his ancestors'
life and how the villagers suffered occasionally from shortage of food. "But Kunta
and the others, being yet little children, paid less attention to the hunger pangs in
their bellies than to playing in the mud, wrestling each other and sliding on their naked
bottoms. Yet in their longing to see the sun again, they would wave up at the slate-colored
sky and shout – as they had seen their parents do – "Shine, sun, and I will kill you a goat!"" (Ibid., pp. 11-12) In Juffure, among the villages, Haley realized in shock that the color of his skin was much lighter that theirs. Skeptics claimed that the griot, Kebba Kanji Fofana, an old man, was a well-known trickster and told the American visitor just what he wanted to hear. Ignoring these kind of rumors, Haley donated money to the village for a new mosque. He also founded in the early 1970s with his brothers the Kinte Foundation to collection and preservation of African-American genealogy records. Roots won in 1977 the National Book Award and a special Pulitzer Prize. In one year, the book sold more than million copies and became the basis of courses in 500 American colleges and universities. Challenging the view of black history as explored in such works as Stanley M. Elkin's Slavery (1959), Haley showed that slaves did not give up all their ties to African culture, but humor, songs, words, and folk beliefs survived. The oppressed never became docile: Kunta Kinte suffered amputation of a foot for his repeated attempts to run away. He also valued his heritage so much that he insisted on being called by his real name Kinte, not by his slave name Toby. Roots, the television miniseries, run from January 23 to January 30, 1977, and attracted some 130 million viewers – the largest audience up to then. Noteworthy, more people have saw the series than read the book. When Haley appeared in February 1977 on the Tonight Show, Johnny Carson said: "If there's anyone watching who does not know about Roots, you must have either been out of the country or on Mars someplace." The idea of miniseries had not been used widely in the United States, except on public television. ABC had in 1975-76 success with Rich Man, Poor Man, which encouraged the network to finance additional miniseries, including Roots. It was shown on eight consecutive nights, an hour or two each night. Each episode was complete within itself, ending in positive, hopeful note, exempt the sixth and seventh. Roots, produced by ABC, was written by William Blinn, Ernest Kinoy, James Lee, and M. Charles Cohen, directed by David Greene, John Erman, Marvin J. Chomsky, Gilbert Moses, and starring Ed Asner, Chuck Connors, Carolyn Jones, O.J. Simpson, Ralph Waite, Lou Gossett, Lorne Greene, Robert Reed, LeVar Burton (as Kunta Kinte), Ben Veeren (as Chicken Geroge), Lynda Day George, Vic Morrow, Raymond St Jacques, Sandy Duncan, John Amos, Leslie Uggams, MacDonald Carey, George Hamilton, Ian MacShane, Richard Roundtree, Lloyd Bridges, Doug McClure, Burl Ives. A second series, Roots: The Next Generations, was shown in 1979. It spanned the period from 1882 to the 1970s. The show run in six 96 minutes episodes. Haley's later literary projects included the history of the town of Henning and a biograph of Frank Wills, the security guard, who discovered the Watergate break-in. In television series Palmerstown, USA (1980), Haley collaborated with the producer Norman Lear. The series was based on Haley's boyhood experiences in Henning. A Different Kind of Christmas (1988) was a short novella, in which a slave esacapes and the son of slaveholding Southern parents slowly realizes, that the practice of slavery is wrong. Queen (1993), completed by David Stevens, was a strong epic novel, which focused on Simon Alexander Haley's side of the family. In 1987, Haley left his home in Beverly Hills, California, and moved to Tennessee, his family's home state. Haley died of heart attack on February 10, 1992, at Swedish Hospital Medical Center in Seattle. In 1999, the Coast Guard commissioned the U.S.C.G.C. Alex Haley in his honor. The ship was the first military vessel named after a journalist. Haley's Playboy interviews with Malcolm X, Johnny Carson, Martin Luther King, Miles Davis, and others, written in the years between 1962 and 1992, have been published in an anthology. Mama Flora's Family (1998), based on Haley's writings and written by David Stevens, is a story of Flora, a black girl born to a sharecropping family in Mississippi. Flora's life is followed from her childhood in the pre-World War I period to the present. The Civil Rights-Black Power paradigm, that caused disagreements in many black families, is one of the central themes of the book. For further reading: American History, American Television, edited by John E. O'Connor (1983); 'Alex Haley's Roots Revisited' by Betty Winston Baye in Essense 22 (February, 1992); Alex Haley, edited by Nathan I. Huggins (1993); 'Alex Haley: Chronicler of Roots', in Great Black Writers by Steven Otfinoski (1994); Alex Haley & Malcolm X's the Autobiography of Malcolm X, edited by Harold Bloom (1996); Great African Americans in Literature by Pat Rediger, et al. (1999); Alex Haley: Author by David Shirley and Heather Lehr Wagner (2005); Alex Haley: And the Books That Changed a Nation by Robert J. Norrell (2015); Making Roots: A Nation Captivated by Matthew F. Delmont (2016); Identifying Roots: Alex Haley and the Anthropology of Scriptures by Richard Newton (2020) Selected works:
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