Alex Haley (17 page)

Nine days later Haley wrote Fisher a letter of reconciliation. Blacks had had many generations to study whites, but whites, he thought, got thin-skinned if they were examined. “Roots”
aspired to prove that blacks belonged in the mainstream of society, and if that was accomplished, Haley would come under public examination. “I have got to be able to stand under the spotlight of the scrutiny that will come,” he wrote. Fisher, Haley asserted, knew how American society worked on celebrities as they reached the higher rungs of fame: it found ways to “diminish, discredit them back down to size, as if to prove they really hadn't belonged all the way up there.” Haley suspected that Fisher had “this discrediting, diminishing potential.” There were two ways that black celebrities were brought down: they were found to have been rule- or lawbreakers at some point in their backgrounds or they were somehow found to be controlled by white people. Fisher had to help Haley guard against both kinds of attack. Black critics would demand to know why he relied on Fisher. Didn't he know any black editors? At the end of the long letter, he asked Fisher to return in early November to Jamaica, where, together, they would hammer out the last chapters about Tom Murray during the Civil War and Reconstruction.
41

The two worked well together from then until the end. Haley now also had the help of Myran Lewis, a graduate student at Ohio State University who was writing a biography of Harriet Tubman. Twenty-six-year-old My was living with Haley and typing the manuscript in exchange for Haley's promise to help her with her book. Haley told Fisher, “This is a very ‘heavy' girl, as the saying goes”—meaning that she was accomplished educationally—but she was also “diminutive, black, cute, quiet, sensitive, very, very sharp.” Lewis typed 120 words per minute and proofread as she went, but she had an even more active role in composing the book's ending. Each morning she rose early, while Haley was still in bed, and sketched out dialogue and details to be added to the text. Her additions were the foundations of scenes in the book, enabling character development. Asked later if she deserved to be named as co-author, she replied, “Alex was 30 years older than me. I had such hero worship going. I couldn't imagine being on the same page with somebody like Alex Haley.” She would become the third Mrs. Alex Haley.
42

* * *

At long last, Haley's financial situation was changing for the better. In October 1975 Wolper had made a payment of $250,000 to Haley for the television series. Haley submitted his final draft of “Roots” to Doubleday in early December, more than eleven years after he had signed a contract for the book. When
Roots
came out, Haley generously acknowledged Murray Fisher. Haley had solicited Fisher's help to structure the book from “a seeming impassable maze of researched materials.” Together they established a pattern of chapters and developed the story line. “Finally, in the book's pressurized completion phase, he even drafted some of
Roots
' scenes,” Haley wrote, “and his brilliant editing pen steadily tightened the book's great length.” It was a generous and accurate tribute.
43

8

The Black Family Bible

Lisa Drew handed Haley the copyedited manuscript of
Roots
on January 23, 1976. Promising to return it with the editor's queries answered a week later, Haley left with the manuscript and settled into the Commodore Hotel in New York, where in the next two weeks he rewrote the last 183 pages. When he returned the manuscript, it was misplaced in the Doubleday building for a few days. The delay was long enough that the now frantic Lisa Drew did not let Haley see the galley proofs: “I was frankly frightened of risking having him rewrite any more at that point.” Doubleday was working to get the book out several months before the airing of the
Roots
television series, which, to great relief at Doubleday, was soon postponed until early 1977. This meant that that Haley could travel to promote the book in the fall of 1976.
1

Though
Roots
was advertised as a book that covered seven generations of Haley's family, it turned out to be far more about slavery than it was about freedom. Over his long years of writing the book, Haley's dominant concern was establishing his African past. He saw that as his greatest contribution to black American history. The book's focus also reflected the disproportionate time he had spent on researching and writing about the African and Middle Passage experiences. By the time he got to writing about the family members born after Chicken George's time—the last four generations—he had to hammer out the remainder in about two months. The ending feels rushed, because the writing of it
was
rushed. Haley planned to dwell on his family's post–Civil War experience in a separate book.
2

Haley's attachment to Kunta Kinte overwhelms his interest in other characters and dominates the book. He devoted years of research to creating an idyllic origin for his family in the unspoiled African environment. Kunta's mother, Binta, and father, Omoro, are perfect parents—well born, wise, and loving—symbols for the original natal family of every black American. Kunta is the African hero, fearless at every turn, until he chooses a peaceful life on the plantation over futile and probably fatal rebellion. He contradicts in every way the archetype of Sambo that Stanley Elkins had presented and that had gained so much attention in the 1960s.

Kunta was the second great hero Haley had created on the page. Kunta and Malcolm X both were examples of fierce, independent, and manly characters, and together they formed a new and cherished archetype for black Americans—and, indeed, for many whites. Haley grappled with issues of identity in writing about Malcolm and then Kunta, and the two may have been proxies, on a subconscious level, for the existential struggles of Haley's own life. The autobiographical impulse takes over
Roots
at the end, when Haley narrates his visit to Juffure.
3

Though the book flows gracefully for at least the first half, Haley frequently tried to tell the reader too much. He relied on slaves' speeches in dialect to narrate the history of race in American history. Their conversations delivered background information on a variety of important historical topics—the death of a president, the invention of the cotton gin—but the means by which slaves acquired knowledge was not always clear, or it was relayed through means that seem contrived. Haley had gathered a vast amount of historical knowledge, and he did not always resist the impulse to show what he knew.

Roots
emphasized the patriarchal authority in Haley's family. Each main male character—Kunta, Chicken George, Tom Murray, Will Palmer, Simon Haley, and Alex—directed the action in the narrative more than the women. Haley's men were proud of their heritage and high social standing. They understood how society worked and acquired skills and, some of them, education. Among the women, only Kunta's American-born daughter, Kizzy, emerged as a multidimensional character, but once her master raped her, the book's focus shifted to her son, George. Bell, Kizzy, and Cynthia Palmer had crucial roles in keeping the family stories, but so did the men. The other female characters operated mostly as props for strong, decisive male characters. As Haley portrayed them, slave women in the United States were overly absorbed with whites' lives and passive about slaves' interests, while the men took responsibility for lifting the race.
4

Haley's portrayal of slave women as passive stands out because it contradicts much of the writing about American slavery since
Roots.
It also opposed the image of slave women that came down from slave narratives. It may have been that the particular pieces of evidence Haley encountered led him in that direction. But because
Roots
was so much a product of his imagination, it had to have resulted to some extent from his own attitude toward women. Notwithstanding his lifelong appreciation for his grandmother and others among his older female kin, he doubted his natal mother's affection for him, and he knew his stepmother did not like him. He had gone through two marriages that ended in protracted and bitter divorces. If time spent with his daughters is an indication, he appears not to have been strongly attached to them. He was charming to women with whom he worked, but he seemed to respect more the views of male colleagues. He spoke proudly of his father, Simon, his brother George, and his colleagues in the publishing business. He admired the integrity of Malcolm X. Did personal or psychological instincts about women shape his interpretations of the past? The evidence is only suggestive.

But there is no doubt that Haley was determined to develop the theme of the strength of black families. He suggested that over the generations, his family had turned chaos into order, lack of education into accomplishment, and trauma into triumph. Each generation accomplished something vital to the survival of the family.
Roots
captured black slave families' vulnerability under the constant threat of being sold away from one another, but Haley also showed those families' resilience. Kizzy was sold away from her parents, but in her new dwelling, older slaves who had also been robbed of family members created a nurturing community for her to find solace. Kizzy's son, Chicken George, was separated from his family for many years but still managed to lead his children through war and Emancipation and, ultimately, to some security in Tennessee. As a family story,
Roots
has a happy ending, and that accounted for much of its popularity.
5

Haley's portrayal of patriarchal power in a black family appealed to many blacks because of a decade-long debate about the plight of black families in the United States. In 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then assistant secretary of labor in the Johnson administration, had prepared a report on black poverty in which he suggested that, despite the great gains of the civil rights movement, African Americans as a group were not progressing economically. In
The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,
Moynihan wrote that the “the Negro family, battered and harassed by discrimination, injustice, and uprooting, is in the deepest trouble.” A black child was eight times more likely than a white to be born out of wedlock; the number of black children supported by welfare was rising rapidly, black male unemployment was going up, and there were three times as many female-headed households among blacks as whites. Moynihan listed the historical circumstances—slavery, white supremacy, migration to cities—that accounted for the differences, but still he characterized the black family as a “tangle of pathology capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world.” He observed that black men had been emasculated, which Haley contradicted with his creation of strong male characters. A white psychologist spoke for many activists and academics when he denounced Moynihan for “blaming the victim.” Moynihan said privately, “Obviously one can no longer address oneself to the subject of the Negro family.”
6
But, in fact, that was what Alex Haley had done—addressed himself to the black family—with a compelling account of family strength and survival.

At exactly the same time that
Roots
appeared, Herbert G. Gutman of the City University of New York answered the Moynihan report with
The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925,
which argued that, while black families did not mirror the structure of white families, they had remained intact through slavery and Emancipation and into the first generation of migration to northern cities. The family was the slaves' salvation through those terrible times. The breakdown that Moynihan described occurred after blacks had been oppressed in urban ghettos for two generations.

Gutman's work was part of a fundamental reinterpretation of American slavery taking place during the last years of Haley's writing of
Roots.
In 1972 John Blassingame of Yale University published
The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South,
which argued that historians of slavery had depended too much on the records of planters to depict slaves' lives. Blassingame used slave narratives to create a portrait of insulated and self-affirming slave communities. He also acknowledged the importance of the family to slaves. “However frequently the family was broken it was primarily responsible for the slave's ability to survive on the plantation without becoming totally dependent on and submissive to his master.”
7
In 1974 Eugene Genovese of the University of Rochester also relied heavily on black sources to create
Roll, Jordan, Roll,
a study that placed heavy emphasis on the sustaining power of slave religion. Genovese concluded that slaves were active in pressing for their own well-being.

It is not clear that Haley was familiar with the work of Gutman, Blassingame, or Genovese, though surely, if he knew of them, he had opportunities to review the works of the latter two before he finished
Roots.
If he was not familiar with any of these academic works, Haley should be credited for his intuition in addressing the same question that these professors, and American scholars in general, had been grappling with for two decades by 1976. In the face of an inhumane and immoral system, how had African Americans survived slavery and moved forward in freedom toward a better life? Haley's answer shared many themes with scholars' responses—and was far more influential.

The most significant contribution of
Roots
to society was the one that Haley had identified all along: with this work, he had recovered the black American's African past. Since the nineteenth century, a few blacks had attempted from time to time to recapture their heritage in Africa, but with the emergence of postcolonial nations on the continent in the 1950s and early 1960s, and the rise of black nationalism in the United States after 1965, a more popular and sustained curiosity about blacks' African origins had emerged. Now a black American's history did not begin on a plantation in the South but reached much further back.
8

* * *

Both Haley and Doubleday insisted that the book was nonfiction. The book jacket mentioned the stories Haley had heard as a child and then called the writer's research “an astonishing feat of genealogical detection” in which he “discovered not only the name of ‘the African' . . . but the precise location of Juffure, the very village in The Gambia . . . from which he was abducted in 1767 at the age of sixteen and taken on the
Lord Ligonier
to Maryland and sold to a Virginia planter.” The book jacket claimed not only that Haley had recovered his family's past but that, “as the first black American writer to trace his origins back to their roots, he has told the story of 25,000,000 Americans of African descent. He has rediscovered for an entire people a rich cultural heritage that slavery took away from them, along with their identities.”
9
Though Haley warned against reading the book strictly as objective history, Doubleday's advertising it so emphatically as historical truth opened the book to intense scrutiny.

Asked later if
Roots
was a work of fiction or nonfiction, Lisa Drew said that while there were fictional elements in the book—particularly the made-up dialogues among slaves, the main thrust of which were historically true—“the life of the African . . . the slave ship crossings, the conditions on those ships [were] pretty universally true.” Drew had one clear reason for using the nonfiction label: “I was terribly afraid if we called this book fiction, although it had fiction elements in it, the people who are not sympathetic to the viewpoint of the book would use that as an excuse to say . . . this is fiction and it is all made up and it didn't happen that way.” In 1978 her colleague Ken McCormick said that he considered the book fiction but that in 1976 he had deferred to Drew. Despite her frustrations in dealing with Haley, Drew was devoted to him personally and may have deferred to his judgment. It is unlikely, however, that she made the determination on her own to call the book nonfiction. At thirty-six she was still a relatively junior editor at Doubleday.
10

Haley and Doubleday might have offered a stronger defense of the historical accuracy of
Roots
. Haley used the neologism “faction,” a blend of historical information and imagined thoughts and conversations. They might have drawn an analogy to the New Journalism that had emerged in the mid-1960s and was popularized by such high-profile writers as Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, and Norman Mailer. Talese, a former
New York Times
reporter, claimed that New Journalism often read like fiction but was more reliable because it sought a “larger truth than is possible through the mere compilation of verifiable facts, the use of direct quotations, and adherence to the rigid organizational style of the older form.” Wolfe loved the new genre because it was now possible “in nonfiction, in journalism, to use any literary device.” Capote believed that “a factual piece of work could explore whole new dimensions in writing that would have a double effect fiction does not have—the every fact of its being true, every word of its [
sic
] true, would add a double contribution of strength and impact.” Capote had already weathered criticism of the method for a decade.
11