Roots: The Saga of an American Family

by Alex Haley

  I found myself so full of the memories that when the mortician said “the deceased,” it startled me that he meant our dad, around whom things rarely got dull. Shortly before the first service that was held for him in a Washington, D.C., chapel thick with family friends, my brother George told the Reverend Boyd, who was in charge, that at an appropriate point, we sons would like to share some memories of Dad with the friends there.

  So after brief conventional services, a favorite song of Dad’s was sung, then George got up and stood near the open casket. He said he vividly recalled that wherever Dad had taught, our home was always shared with at least one youth whose rural farmer father Dad had talked into letting his son attend college, the “no money” protest being solved by Dad’s saying, “He’ll live with us.” As a result, George estimated that about the South were around eighteen county agricultural agents, high school principals, and teachers who proudly call themselves “’Fessor Haley’s boys.”

  George said that among earlier memory was once when we lived in Alabama and at breakfast Dad said, “You boys come on, there’s a great man I want you to meet.” And just like that Dad drove us three boys the several hours to Tuskeegee, Alabama, where we visited the mysterious laboratory of the small, dark genius scientist, Dr. George Washington Carver, who talked to us about the need to study hard and gave us each a small flower. George said that in Dad’s later years, he had been irked that we did not hold annual large family reunions as he would have liked, and George asked the audience now to join us in feeling that really we were holding a reunion both for and with our dad.

  I got up as George took his seat, and going over, looking at Dad, I said to the people that being the oldest child, I could remember things farther back about the gentleman lying there. For instance, my first distinct boyhood impression of love was noticing how Dad’s and Mama’s eyes would look at each other over the pianotop when Mama was playing some little introduction as Dad stood near waiting to sing in our church. Another early memory was of how I could always get a nickel or even a dime from Dad, no matter how tight people were going around saying things were. All I had to do was catch him alone and start begging him to tell me just one more time about how his AEF 92nd Division, 366th Infantry, fought in the Meuse Argonne Forest. “Why, we were ferocious, son!” Dad would exclaim. By the time he gave me the dime it was clear that whenever things would look really grim to General Blackjack Pershing, once again he would send a courier to bring Savannah, Tennessee’s, Sargeant Simon A. Haley (No. 2816106), whereupon the lurking German spies sped that news to their highest command, throwing fright into the Kaiser himself.

  But it seemed to me, I told the people, that after Dad’s having met Mama at Lane College, his next most fateful meeting for all of us had been when Dad had transferred to A&T College in Greensboro, North Carolina, and was about to drop out of school and return home to sharecrop, “Because, boys, working four odd jobs, I just never had time to study.” But before he left, word came of his acceptance as a temporary summer-season Pullman porter. On a night train from Buffalo to Pittsburgh, at about 2 A.M. his buzzer rang, and a sleepless white man and his wife each wanted a glass of warm milk. Dad brought the milk, he said, “and I tried to leave, but the man was just talkative and seemed surprised that I was a working college student. He asked lots of questions, then he tipped well in Pittsburgh.” After saving every possible cent, when Dad returned to college that September of 1916, the college president showed him correspondence from the man on the train—a retired Curtis Publishing Company executive named R. S. M. Boyce—who had written asking the cost of one full year’s everything, then had sent his check. “It was about $503.15 with tuition, dormitory, meals, and books included,” Dad said, and he scored marks that later saw him win a graduate-study scholarship that the Cornell University School of Agriculture began giving that year to the top agricultural student at each of the Negro land-grant colleges.

  And that, I told the people, was how our dad got his masters degree at Cornell, and then was a professor, so that we, his children, grew up amid those kinds of influences, which when put together with what a lot of other people on our mama’s side also had done, was why we were fortunate enough to be there seeing Dad off now with me as an author, George as an assistant director of the United States Information Agency, Julius as a U. S. Navy Department architect, and Lois as a teacher of music.

  We flew Dad’s body then to Arkansas, where a second ceremony was thronged with his friends from Pine Bluff’s AM&N University and its area where as the dean of agriculture, Dad had rounded out his total of forty years of educating. As we knew he would have wanted, we drove him through the campus and twice along the road where the street sign near the agricultural building said “S. A. Haley Drive,” as it had been named when he retired.

  The Pine Bluff service over, we took Dad to where he had previously told us he wanted to lie—in the Veterans’ Cemetery in Little Rock. Following his casket as it was taken to Section 16, we stood and watched Dad lowered into grave No. 1429. Then we whom he had fathered—members of the seventh generation from Kunta Kinte—walked away rapidly, averting our faces from each other, having agreed we wouldn’t cry.

  So Dad has joined the others up there. I feel that they do watch and guide, and I also feel that they join me in the hope that this story of our people can help to alleviate the legacies of the fact that preponderantly the histories have been written by the winners.

  ALEX HALEY

  (1921-1992)

  A BIOGRAPHY

  Alexander Murray Palmer Haley was born in Ithaca, New York, on August 11, 1921. The oldest of three sons (George and Julius Haley), Haley was born to Simon and Bertha (Palmer) Haley. He grew up in the South in an African-American family also mixed with Irish and Cherokee ancestry. Haley’s father, Simon, was a professor of agriculture who had also served in World War I. Haley always spoke proudly of his father and the incredible obstacles of racism he had overcome.

  At the age of fifteen, Alex graduated from high school. He attended Elizabeth City Teachers College for two years and on May 24, 1939, he began his twenty-year service with the Coast Guard. He enlisted as a seaman and then became a third-class petty officer in the rate of mess attendant, one of the few enlisted designators open to African-Americans at that time. It was during his service in the Pacific Theater of Operations that Haley taught himself the craft of writing stories.

  After World War II, Haley was able to petition the Coast Guard to allow him to transfer into the field of journalism. By 1949, he had become a first-class petty officer in the rate of chief journalist. He then rose to chief petty officer until his retirement from the Coast Guard in 1959. Alex Haley was the first and only person to receive an honorary degree from the Coast Guard Academy, presented by President George H. W. Bush, and he had the singular honor of having a Coast Guard Cutter named after him. Alex Haley’s numerous awards and decorations from the Coast Guard include the American Defense Service Medal, World War II Victory Medal, and the National Defense Service Medal.

  In 1941 Haley married Nannie Branch. The marriage ended in divorce in 1964, and in the same year Haley married Juliette Collins. They divorced in 1972. His third wife was the former Myra Lewis of Los Angeles.

  After his retirement from the Coast Guard, Haley began his writing career and eventually became a senior editor for Reader’s Digest. Throughout the 1960s, Haley was responsible for some of Reader’s Digest ’s most notable interviews, including an interview with American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell. Haley conducted the first Playboy Interview for Playboy magazine. Following this, Alex conducted a series of interviews with jazz legend Miles Davis, the first of which appeared in the September 1962 issue. His interviews with Malcolm X lead to his first book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley (1965). Selling more than six million copies by 1977 in the United States and other countries, it was translated into eight languages. This literary work accorded Haley true fame as an author and was l
ater named by Time magazine one of the ten most important nonfiction books of the twentieth century.

  In 1976 Haley published Roots: The Saga of an American Family, a novel based loosely on his family’s history, starting with the story of Kunta Kinte, kidnapped in The Gambia in 1767 to be sold as a slave in the United States. This work involved ten years of research, intercontinental travel and writing. Haley went to the village of Juffure where Kunta Kinte grew up, which was still in existence, and listened to a tribal historian tell the story of Kinte’s capture. Haley also traced the records of the ship, the Lord Ligonier, which carried his ancestor to America.

  Roots was eventually published in thirty-seven languages. It won the 1977 National Book Award as well as a Pulitzer Prize and went on to become a landmark television miniseries in 1977. The book and film both reached unparalleled success. The television miniseries attracted a record-breaking 130 million viewers when it was serialized on television. The series set records for the number of viewers, and the Sunday night finale achieved the highest ranking for a single television production. Roots emphasized that African-Americans have a long history and that not all of that history is lost, as many had previously believed. Its popularity sparked an increased public interest in genealogy as well.

  Roots and Alex Haley attracted controversy over the years—which comes with the territory of path-breaking iconic books, particularly on the topic of race. In 1978, novelist Harold Courlander sued Alex Haley, claiming that portions of Courlander’s novel The African had been plagiarized in Roots. After a trial, Haley settled out of court for $650,000 after admitting that several passages of Roots were copied from Courlander’s novel. However, Haley stated that the appropriation of these passages was unintentional and also claimed that researchers helping him had given him this material without citing the source. The settlement permitted the continued publication of Roots as Alex Haley wrote it. In 1988 Margaret Walker also sued him, claiming that Roots violated the copyright for her novel Jubilee. Her case was dismissed by the court.

  There were also some questions about whether Roots was fact or fiction, and whether Alex Haley confused these two issues. Haley addressed these issues head-on in the book itself:To the best of my knowledge and of my effort, every lineage statement within Roots is from either my African or American families’ carefully preserved oral history, much of which I have been able conventionally to corroborate with documents. Those documents, along with the myriad textural details of what were contemporary indigenous lifestyles, cultural history, and such that give Roots flesh have come from years of intensive research in fifty-odd libraries, archives, and other repositories on three continents.

  Since I wasn’t around when most of the story occurred, by far most of the dialogue and most of the incidents are of necessity a novelized amalgam of what I know took place together with what my researching let me to plausibly feel took place.

  Haley received the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal in 1977. Four thousand deans and department heads of colleges and universities throughout the country in a survey conducted by Scholastic Magazine selected Haley as America’s foremost achiever in the literature category. (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was selected in the religious category.) The ABC-TV network presented another series, Roots: The Next Generation, in February 1979 (also written by Haley). Roots had sold almost five million copies by December 1978 and had been reprinted in twenty-three languages.

  Haley’s later literary projects included a history of the town of Henning, Tennessee, and a biography of Frank Wills, the security guard who discovered the Watergate break-in. In the 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 manages to escape and as a result, the son of slaveholding southern parents slowly realizes that the practice of slavery is wrong. Then, in the late 1980s, Haley began working on a second historical novel based on another branch of his family, traced through his grandmother Queen—the daughter of a black slave woman and her white master. Queen (1993) 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 a heart attack on February 10, 1992, at the Swedish Hospital Medical Center in Seattle, Washington, before he could complete Queen. At his request, the novel was finished by David Stevens and was published as Alex Haley’s Queen. It was subsequently made into a movie in 1993.

  Haley was posthumously awarded the Korean War Service Medal from the government of South Korea ten years after his death. This award, created in 1999, did not exist during Haley’s lifetime, but demonstrates how both his life and his legacy continue to impact the lives and works of people throughout the world to this day.

  On October 10, 1991, Alex Haley gave a speech to the employees of Reader’s Digest that included information about the writing of Roots while traveling on freight ships. This is an excerpt from the live recording.

  ALEX HALEY ON THE WRITING OF ROOTS

  Reprinted by permission from Reader’s Digest.

  There’s something about when you go out on a ship and usually, I go out on freight ships, cargo ships; I wouldn’t get caught on a liner. How can you write with 800 people dancing? But on the freight ships, not many of them carry passengers, but those which do carry passengers carry a total of twelve, a maximum of twelve people. The law is that if a ship carries more than twelve, it must have a doctor on board. So the people who go out there tend to be very quiet people. It is said, not too far amiss, that excitement on a cargo ship is when someone finishes a jigsaw puzzle.

  But what I do is I go and work my principal work hours from about 10:30 at night until daybreak. The world is yours at that point. Most of all the passengers are asleep. Sometimes there are only three other people awake on the ship. On the bridge, the officer of the day and the helmsman, and the guy who makes the rounds punching clocks every hour, and you. The thing I particularly love is when you get in there and you’ve got all your notes and your research and stuff literally in the one room with you. It’s sometimes up on your bunk, and you sleep with it all by your feet. It’s a lovely feeling—like being in the womb with what you are trying to do. I find myself from time to time, when I’m writing, I’ll do things, visual things. I’ll remember you as an audience. I’ll remember what you look like as a group. And it’s just kind of nice. And I think, well, I want to write this thing so they will read this or they’ll print that. It just comes into your head, things like that.

  You’re out there by yourself. When you get far enough along, you really start to talk with your characters. I had so many conversations with Chicken George and Kunta Kinte it wasn’t even funny. It was natural. I’m sitting up in my underwear, by myself, minding my business, talking with them. And that was just as routine as it could be. Come around about 1:30 in the morning—you’ve been working since 10:30 and decide you’re going to take a little break. So you get up and you walk up on the deck. And you put your hand on the top rail, your foot on the bottom rail, and you look up. The first most striking thing is, man, you look up and there are heavenly objects as you never saw them before. You find yourself looking at planets at sea. And what you start to realize is that you never saw clear air before—even out here where it’s clear compared to New York City. This is nowhere near like it is at sea. In some latitudes, down off West Africa, South America, on the night of a full moon, there are times when you get into an illusion. If you could just stretch a little further, you feel like you could touch it. And you are out there amidst all this, God’s firmament, and then you stand and you feel through the sole of your shoe a fine vibration and you realize that’s man at work. That’s a huge diesel turbine, thirty-five feet down under the water, driving this ship like a small island through the water. Still standing there now you start hearing a slight h
issing sound. You realize that’s the skin of the ship cutting through the resistance of the ocean. With all that going on, feeling these man things and seeing the God things, that’s about as close to holy as you’re going to ever get.

  I find that’s why I just love to get out in the ocean. And I find that you are really out there, find yourself thinking in ways you haven’t thought before. We are here doing the jobs we all do. We really operate by rote. You don’t think. You do something you’ve done 500 times before and you know how to do it. But out there you find that your mind will engage something almost like biscuit dough. And feel it turning around and your mind can examine it and so forth. And I’ve been really seriously thinking about maybe the latter part of next year trying to see if I can’t set up a schedule where I would spend one month at sea and one month ashore right around the year. And that way I’d get my work done. And I could come back here and be all the things that you are as a kind of public writer.

  As it is, it’s silly, but I would like to be cloned. I’d love to have one person who was chained to a type writer, computer, whatever. And the other one would be a public writer who would go around talking about writing. And the other would be a relatively normal human being. Something like that. It’s the truth. Most of us who are writers get writers and other creative people; I meet with a lot of creative people.

  I was talking with a dear buddy of mine, Quincy Jones, two weeks ago. We were at New York for the funeral of Miles Davis. We were talking about how you get caught up in what’s called success. Once you have that blessing, it’s so hard to do what you did in the first place to get it. Quincy said he couldn’t remember when he composed anything. And I know he hasn’t; he’s so successful. Miles, bless his heart, was still playing his horn right up to the end. But lots of people who are very successful have a hard time working as well as they did before. I would tell you the truth. The best writing I ever possibly could do was when, after The Digest gave me the help to go to Africa and to go to Europe, and I was not known and I could just take my time and nobody there was pressing me. God, I don’t know how long it took me. I told all kinds of lies to editors here about when I would finish. But I was working slowly, slowly.