Alex Haley

by Robert J. Norrell

  In due course, the book was recognized as one of the greatest of American autobiographies. It remains on required-reading lists in high schools and colleges. In 1997 The Norton Anthology of African American Literature included a long excerpt from the book and noted that it “remains a classic of American autobiography.” In a 2010 book dedicated to scholarly appreciation of Malcolm’s significance, the literary critic Robert E. Terrill wrote that The Autobiography of Malcolm X was “the fundamental text at the center of all studies of Malcolm,” a “literary masterpiece” that showed his own transformation and, “through his eyes, the world in which and against which he wrought those changes.”40

  The Autobiography of Malcolm X conformed to the genre patterns established two centuries earlier in Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography in the way that it moved, as the literary scholar Carol Ohmann wrote, from “inexperience to sophistication, from ignorance to enlightenment, from obscurity to worldly prominence.” Like Franklin, Malcolm projected himself as a rational man committed to understanding and mastering society. As with many other American autobiographies—those of Andrew Carnegie and Booker T. Washington are examples—Malcolm embraced the Franklin virtues: cleanliness, frugality, morality, and hard work. But The Autobiography of Malcolm X was also distinctly African American in the way that it conformed to patterns established by previous memoirs and autobiographies by black writers, works that Robert B. Stepto has referred to collectively as the “narrative of ascent.”41

  In its re-creation of one life, The Autobiography of Malcolm X was not objective or definitive. No less an authority than W. E. B. Du Bois admitted in his third and last autobiography that such was impossible: “Autobiographies do not form indisputable authorities. They are always incomplete, and often unreliable. Eager as I am to put down the truth, there are difficulties; memory fails especially in small details, so that it becomes finally but a theory of my life, with much forgotten and misconceived, with valuable testimony but often less than absolutely true, despite my intention to be frank and fair.”42

  Unlike other autobiographies, Malcolm X takes the reader through to the end of its subject’s life, although it is not Malcolm but Alex Haley who escorts readers to Malcolm’s death. In the body of the book, Haley skillfully keeps the focus on Malcolm’s life and death, but the epilogue is almost as much the story of Haley as of Malcolm—the story of the most important part of Haley’s writing life. In that sense, The Autobiography of Malcolm X is also Haley’s act of self-invention.

  6

  Before This Anger

  In 1964 and 1965, before he completed The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Haley took three trips that shaped his next project, “Before This Anger.” The contract he had signed with Doubleday in August 1964 remained in force after the publisher canceled Malcolm X. In early 1964 Haley went to London to do a Playboy interview with the actress Julie Christie, and when the interview was canceled, he visited the British Museum. There, he saw the Rosetta Stone, the second-century BCE artifact that displayed a message in three ancient languages, which enabled a French scholar to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs. Haley was excited by how the Rosetta Stone had unlocked “a door into the history of man.” He felt vaguely that it had personal significance, which finally dawned on him: he wanted to find the meaning of the words of his African ancestor.

  When he went to Kansas City in October 1964 to help with his brother George’s campaign, he visited with his cousin Georgia Anderson, the last survivor among the women on Cynthia’s front porch. Georgia was thrilled to discuss Haley’s plans to write the family history. “Our history needs to be writ,” she said. “We can’t speck white folks to write our history for us. They’s too busy writin’ ’bout theyselves.” She told him to get on with the work. “Yo’ sweet grandma an’ all of ’em—dey up dere watchin’ you.” Haley returned for George’s swearing-in ceremony, at which Georgia said to Alex and his brothers, “Y’all chillen jes’ keep on. Go fowud! Go fowud, boys!”1

  Then, on a Saturday in 1965, Haley went to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and looked at census records from Alamance County, North Carolina, for the years just after the Civil War. In the story told on the front porch, Alamance was the place where his great-grandfather Tom Murray lived before moving to Henning. He looked at frame after frame of microfilm of the 1870 census, and he was at the point of frustration when he found the names Tom and Irene Murray. Then he found a young child, Elizabeth. This was his Aunt Liz. Cynthia was not listed, he realized, because she was not yet born. Thrilled with his discovery, he returned for more research at the archives, the Library of Congress, and the Daughters of the American Revolution Library.2

  These discoveries, coupled with Cousin Georgia’s exhortations, led Haley to change “Before This Anger” from a portrait of the 1930s South to the story of his family. He wanted to start with the original African taken into slavery. “His name no one seems ever to have heard,” he told Reynolds. Haley soon began calling him the Mandingo and reported that he “sired a number of children on the several plantations to which he was sold.” One of those children, the last one, Haley believed, told the Mandingo’s story to Chicken George, his great-great grandfather, who handed it down to Tom Murray. Tom told it to Cynthia and Liz, who repeated it to little Palmer Haley.

  Alex began to think of his family’s experience as representative of all African American families. “In America, I think, there has not been such a book,” he told Reynolds. “‘Rooting’ a Negro family, all the way back,” was “part and parcel of the American saga.” He would recount the story “without rancor, which I do not feel.” The triumphal moment of the story would be George Haley’s political success. The book would be one that “America, the world needs to read,” he believed, and “I shall write it with love.” But he had much research to do first, and he pleaded for Reynolds to be patient. “All will be justified within this year. You watch!” Haley was promising the completed book by the end of 1965.3

  Haley knew little about the experience of slaves in the South. Most of his impressions of slavery were from the novels Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Gone with the Wind and the movie adapted from the latter. His grandmother had reproved his mother for dismissing all discussion of slavery, and Haley realized by the 1960s that he was like Bertha—he had no “interest in slaves.”4 The history of American slavery was in the midst of a far-reaching revision in the 1960s, largely influenced by the civil rights movement. Younger historians rejected the view, promoted since the late nineteenth century, that slavery was a benign institution populated by happy slaves and kindly masters. Scholars began to offer a harsher view, but the interpretation that captured the most attention in the 1960s was that of Stanley Elkins, which drew an analogy between American slaves’ behavior and the way Jews in Nazi concentration camps cowered before their oppressors’ authority. Elkins suggested that, to survive their ordeal, slaves assumed the pose of “Sambo,” who was “docile but irresponsible, loyal but lazy, humble but chronically given to lying and stealing.” George Sims, helping Haley research “Before This Anger,” found a collection of two thousand slave interviews recorded by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. To Haley, the interviews duplicated the “stories and phrasings I had heard as a boy on the front porch in Henning.”5

  In October 1965 Haley published an article entitled “My Search for Roots” in the Philadelphia Sunday Bulletin. “I have travelled thousands of miles to see and question our family’s oldest members. . . . Their narratives often were emotional experiences. Sometimes I had to take notes through tears.” He discussed the fact of white paternity in many black families. His paternal great-grandparent, a Confederate colonel named James Jackson, presided over an Alabama plantation. Haley revealed that he had already established the time—1766—that his ancestor had been brought on a slave ship to America. He intended to travel to the “slave coast” of Africa and then “return here, symbolically, by ship.” Haley reporte
d happily that as he did genealogical research on his family, he encountered many other blacks doing the same thing.6

  If Haley was getting well versed in American slavery, he knew almost nothing about Africa. Predominant in the minds of most Americans were images of Africans swinging on vines—acting very much like the apes with whom they shared the jungle. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan novels, and the many movies made from them, depicted Africans as dumb and superstitious, teased by white Europeans who called them “boy.” For Haley this was an uncomfortable view of his heritage, certainly as compared with whites’ pride in their European ancestry. He had no idea how the slave trade worked. Africans had not “simply walked into slave ships.” He knew nothing of the passage across the Atlantic. “What must it have been like for those Africans, naked, chained, terrified, in unquestionably small wooden ships, in particular when they got into rough seas[?]”7

  At the end of World War II, no American university had yet treated the history of Africa as more than a study of European exploration and exploitation. Some academics thought that Africa was not a legitimate historical subject because there were few written documents other than those created by European colonial regimes. What little interest there was in Africa in the United States was shaped by American concerns. In 1941 the anthropologist Melville Herskovits at Northwestern University published The Myth of the Negro Past, in which he argued that there were many African cultural practices that survived in the lives of American blacks. But Herskovits came under attack from E. Franklin Frazier, an influential black sociologist, who suspected that the emphasis on African cultural survivals was an attempt to support innate, persistent biological and cultural differences between blacks and whites. Haley surmised that most scholars believed that “there was no legacy, the break had been absolute.” But he began doing research anyway, “digging out actual facts of African cultural life.”8

  Interest in the study of Africa grew in the 1950s, spurred by the independence movement that spread across the continent. Thirty new African nations were chartered in the decade after 1952, and their creations were continuously reported in the West. Working with Malcolm had educated Haley about African political events. Herskovits developed the first academic program for the study of African history, assembled at Northwestern a large collection of African artifacts and historical material, and in 1957 started the African Studies Association. But Haley learned from his reading about Africa in 1965 and 1966 that he probably would not find what he was seeking about his ancestors in traditional, written sources. Having discovered most of what he knew from the stories his grandmother told, he believed that he would need oral sources.

  As it happened, a scholar had just emerged whose work provided a strong rationale for using oral sources. In 1961 Jan Vansina, a Belgian anthropologist who had done extensive work in Central Africa, moved to the University of Wisconsin at the same time he published a seminal book, The Oral Tradition. This work considered the nature of oral evidence as an historical source and justified its collection and its use in history. Vansina wrote that the historian “using oral traditions finds himself on exactly the same level as historians using any other kind of historical source material. No doubt he will arrive at a lower degree of probability than would otherwise be obtained, but that does not rule out the fact that what he is doing is valid, and that it is history.”9

  * * *

  Almost as soon as The Autobiography of Malcolm X was in bookstores, Haley began promoting the development of a film based on it. Most of the celebrities he had known in San Francisco and New York worked in the movie industry. One could earn fame as a best-selling author, but great heights of celebrity were achieved on the big screen. He also wanted to sell the movie rights for the money it would bring in. The actor James Earl Jones expressed an interest in playing Malcolm on both stage and screen, and the film producer and director Elia Kazan wanted to bring Malcolm’s story to the New York stage. Marvin Worth, an agent for musicians, declared his interest in producing a film. James Baldwin was engaged to write both a play and a film script. When Haley told Paul Reynolds of the exciting prospects, Reynolds warned him that film and theater people often did not follow through with their plans. As he typically was, Reynolds was right.10

  By June 1966 the autobiography had sold fourteen thousand copies in hardback, hardly the numbers of a best seller. Appreciation of the book had grown, however, owing to the veneration of Malcolm that spread after his death. The Black Power movement had exploded in the South in May and June as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ejected its white members and denounced nonviolence. The memory of Malcolm’s anger against whites and his projection of black manhood spurred the growth of black nationalism, especially among younger civil rights activists who had become frustrated with what they viewed as the slow pace of change. Nonetheless, for the moment, The Autobiography of Malcolm X did not solve Alex Haley’s financial problems.11

  Haley’s magazine work diminished as he devoted more time to “Before This Anger.” He did have a memorable experience interviewing the American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell for Playboy. Haley was now paid $1,500 (about $11,000 in 2015 dollars) for doing an interview. Rockwell was an American eccentric, a career military officer until his fascist politics got him dismissed from the army. When Haley contacted him by phone about an interview, Rockwell asked if he was a Jew. Haley said no and chose not to mention that he was black. Meeting Haley in person, Rockwell received the writer but armed himself, placing a pearl-handled revolver on his chair. Haley’s first question was why Rockwell needed the gun when there were armed bodyguards all around. Rockwell answered that he received thousands of threats against his life. (Indeed, a member of his own organization would assassinate him the following year. Haley would later note that three of his early Playboy interview subjects were assassinated.) Rockwell declared, “It’s nothing personal, but I want you to understand that I don’t mix with your kind, and we call your race ‘niggers.’” Haley answered that he had been called “nigger” many times, but “this is the first time I’m being paid for it. So you go right ahead.” He followed that with, “What have you got against us ‘niggers?’” Nothing, Rockwell answered; he just thought blacks would be happier where they came from, and “white people in America simply aren’t going to allow you to mix totally with them.” Haley noted that the civil rights movement was concerned with equal rights, not miscegenation. Rockwell shot back, “Race mixing is what it boils down to in practice; and the harder you people push for that, the madder white people are going to get.” The interview continued in the style of a debate, with Rockwell expending much effort in denying the Holocaust.12

  Later in 1966 Haley interviewed Sammy Davis Jr., the singer, dancer, and actor he had met in San Francisco in the late 1950s and with whom he had renewed his acquaintance at London’s Playboy Club in 1964. The interview proved to be one of Haley’s most enlightening efforts in what it revealed about the struggles of a black celebrity. Whereas Miles Davis had confidently expressed anger over racial indignities, Sammy Davis revealed to Haley the vulnerability he had felt continuously, beginning with his childhood days of performing in vaudeville with his father. Davis was often hungry, never went to school, suffered racist abuse in the army, and endured constant humiliations as a touring entertainer. He tried to counter prejudice with his performances. His great talent was recognized during his nightclub appearances in the early 1950s, and he was propelled to national fame as both a singer and actor. But he always went on stage conscious of race, anticipating “what people out there may be feeling against me emotionally” and intending to “rob them of what they’re sitting there thinking: Negro.” The pressure of success led him to extravagant living and gambling at the same time that he became the object of abuse for partying with the white actress Ava Gardner and dating Kim Novak, a beautiful white starlet. The black press attacked him for insufficient “race consciousness” and the white press for b
reaking the race-sex taboo. By 1966 Davis had overcome a wealth of abuse and was doing well financially and personally—with a Swedish actress, May Britt, as his wife—but he never felt secure. “Things are really swinging for me now, but I can’t help thinking that I might wake up some morning and find myself out of vogue, kaput.” He’d had a recent experience when he was gripped with fear and thought to himself, “I’m going to die, because things are going too well.”13

  * * *

  In August 1966 Haley told Paul Reynolds that his marriage was failing but that he and Julie were trying to reconcile. “She always felt left out because attention was always on Alex,” observed a man who knew Julie at the time. Marital problems worsened Haley’s financial strain. Julie demanded money, though there is no indication that her demands were anything but reasonable, given that she was tending to two-year-old Cynthia. Traveling frequently to locations that he kept secret and living in hotels cost money that Haley did not have. He now wanted to move the family, intact, to California for a new start in the marriage.14

  Haley’s tax problems were mounting. The IRS was hounding him with “cold adamance and actually humanly devastating collections,” he said, and was trying to obtain 100 percent of his income. In October 1966 Haley received a bill from the IRS for $4,577 for back taxes from 1963. (In 2015 dollars, that was about $32,800.) Haley told Reynolds that he was spending a lot of time fending off creditors. He owed Diners Club for accumulated travel expenses. Could Reynolds lend him $5,000, most of which would go to the IRS? “I have owed them so long,” Haley said. Reynolds worked with lawyers on Haley’s IRS problems and lent him the money.15

  Haley complained that Doubleday should provide a larger advance. He had accepted a $5,000 advance in 1964, and in the ensuing years, he saw Doubleday give advances to other writers that were a hundred times larger. In the late 1960s publishers began paying much higher advances in general for books they believed would find large audiences. He felt that as a result of the critical acclaim for The Autobiography of Malcolm X he should receive more money. “I write now of my family. . . . I know I will make my family name, Haley, famed far beyond Malcolm X.” He knew “what I could have as a book, if I could go all out” and travel to Africa and other places to do research. “I make you a prediction, friend. I won’t come right out and call the name of the Prize. I just say to you: you just watch what we are going to win. Because just ain’t never been a book like this one.”16