Alex Haley (3 page)

Palmer was a dreamy boy, not a good student like George. He was happiest while cruising the stacks of the Alabama A&M library, looking for books of adventure. In school, he often drifted into an imaginary world. “I was given to creating fantasies of all kinds that I would never tell anybody,” he recalled. He liked classes that required writing, though he was never asked to write more than the simplest narrative. Simon had insisted when Palmer was eight that he learn to type, which may have been the most useful skill he acquired in his formal education. He was always younger than the other students in his class, finishing high school in Alabama at age sixteen. He was small in stature and shy around girls. “Instead of being the one who was kissing the girls,” he said, “I was the one who took love notes from the girls I wished I could kiss to somebody [else].” Palmer later remembered a particular girl in Alabama, a “big, hefty, kind of a cotton field type girl,” who pulled him under the school stairs when he was in the eleventh grade. “I was so mortified, embarrassed, and she just grabbed me all about the ears” and kissed him.

In 1937 Palmer graduated from high school in Alabama and went with his father to Alcorn A&M in the Mississippi Delta. Why Simon left Alabama A&M is not clear, nor do we know why he quit the Alcorn job before starting it. Zeona had gone with the other children to Elizabeth City College in North Carolina, and Simon followed her there. Palmer stayed at Alcorn for his freshman year. He liked being on his own, living in a dormitory, and being free of Simon and Zeona's supervision. He was water boy on the football team but a mediocre student who failed French. He was interested in girls, but he was young and looked it. Slight of frame, he had reached his full height of five feet, seven inches.

In 1938 Palmer joined his family at Elizabeth City College, where he again did poorly in his studies. Simon had high expectations for his children's education: he wanted each of them to earn a bachelor's degree, then graduate degrees, and he hoped that they would also become college professors. But Palmer “didn't have any ambition to be a teacher,” he said later. “I was for three weeks going to be an aviator and then the next week I was going to be something else.” Writing and journalism never occurred to him as a career. “We just didn't have writing in our immediate world. There were no role models.” When Palmer's performance in school fell short of his father's expectations, Simon spanked the boy. Still only eighteen years old, Palmer agreed with his father that he would benefit from time in the military, after which he might have the maturity to do better in higher education. The military would also give him another chance to be on his own. Palmer liked the uniforms of the Coast Guard, and in 1939 Simon oversaw Palmer's enlistment for three years. Thus began an entirely new phase of his life—as a cook.

2

The Cook Who Writes

Palmer's first ship was the cutter
Mendota,
a patrol boat out of Norfolk, Virginia, and on his first voyage, to Bermuda, he got “sicker than hell.” The Coast Guard's long history of skilled black service had, in the decades leading up to World War II, devolved into a near-perfect caste system. Virtually every black man in the Coast Guard was either a steward or a mess boy. At any one time, there were between six and ten black seamen on the
Mendota.
Filipinos made up the rest of the mess staff. Every day the mess boys shined shoes and brass, cleaned staterooms, made the officers' bunks, and scrubbed and waxed the wardroom floor. Then they showered quickly, dressed in their white jackets, set the dining table with china and silver, and served the officers' dinner. “A messboy was the lowliest of creatures,” Palmer later said. “We were domestics.” The system was unfair, but Palmer “didn't see it was unfair then because that was the way things were outside [of the military] at the time.” Some mess staff thought their jobs were better than those on deck. “You ate well, you were clean, you were kind of protected, shielded,” Palmer later said. Roy Byrd, one of Palmer's black shipmates, who had grown up in poverty and racism in Georgia, said that life in the Coast Guard was the best he had known. To be sure, there was discrimination, but there were three square meals every day and opportunities for further education. “We found a home in the military. . . . We just did what we were told,” Byrd said.
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The
Mendota
patrolled the coast from New Jersey to North Carolina. The crew constantly performed drills—collision, fire, man-overboard maneuvers. But it was not all work: seamen played chess and pinochle and watched movies many nights. The greatest excitement of Palmer's time in the Coast Guard was the rescue of German sailors whose cargo ship had broken up near Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. The
Mendota
recovered the bodies of several dead seamen.
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Palmer liked the military. “I was on my own,” he said later, which did “a great deal for my self-image.” In the Coast Guard, there were still people telling him what to do, but it was not like being ordered around at home. He was thrilled to awaken at sea and stand at the rail, looking at the ocean. He liked the smells of paint and steam and of coffee. He enjoyed talking with his shipmates. In recognition of his new condition, he began to identify himself as Alex Haley.

In Norfolk, where there were thousands of sailors, Haley joined the shore liberty forays of older mess boys and stewards. Prostitutes captured his attention in the black area of Norfolk known as “Trick Street.” Women were “the number one objective of almost every red-blooded sailor that I ever knew.” Haley had his first sexual encounter when he and a buddy got drunk, and the friend took him to a prostitute called Chow-Chow, telling her, “My friend here wants a piece-a-ass.” Haley followed her upstairs as Ella Fitzgerald sang “A Tisket, A Tasket” on the jukebox.
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One fellow seaman remembered that Haley was different from the other mess boys, more educated and able to converse with white officers.
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That ability was both a blessing and a burden for him. Lieutenant Junior Grade Murray Day, from South Carolina, noted Haley's intelligence and college training and ordered him to do the work for Day's college correspondence courses. Day was pleased when Haley won him high grades, but when he got a C in a meteorology course, Day became enraged at Haley and cursed him. Haley responded that Day was a “stupid son-of-a-bitch.” At the point of blows, they both pulled back. Haley left the confrontation expecting to get court-martialed, but when the two were summoned to meet with the captain, Day said to forget it. He did not want the story to get out about a black sailor doing his work for him.
5

When Haley developed a pen-pal relationship with a young white woman, he made the mistake of showing her picture to his mates. News of his white female friend got around the base, and he was transferred out of Norfolk to Beaufort, North Carolina, and assigned to the USCG
Pamlico,
an old cutter that patrolled the North Carolina coastline. In Beaufort he advanced from mess boy to mess attendant first class, got an increase in pay, and cooked for a small group in the officers' mess. Isaiah “Pop” Robinson, a veteran Coast Guard cook, taught him to stew meat and crumble egg yolks and parsley into the mix for appearance's sake. Officers thought they were gourmets, Pop advised; they ate with their eyes, whereas enlisted sailors ate with their bellies. Haley was helping Pop clean up the galley after lunch on the first Sunday in December 1941 when a sailor rushed in and blurted: “The radio says the Japs just bombed the hell out of us—somewhere called Pearl Harbor!” The next day Haley knew the world had changed: the crew had to rescue a Filipino shipmate from a group of red-faced, cursing white boys who were chasing him up the gangplank shouting, “Jap! Jap! Jap!”
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Just as the war broke out, Haley was driving around Beaufort and spotted a beautiful, light-complected young girl on the street. “She had a doe look about her,” Haley recalled. “She was young and lovely and shy.” He did not introduce himself then, but afterward he searched for her and finally found Nannie Branche at a dance. “Her voice was soft, with a gentle accent,” Haley recalled. He pursued Nan vigorously, meeting her at a joint called The Quick Lunch, where one could get a baloney sandwich and a Pepsi for a nickel each and then play the jukebox for the same price. As the necessities of war pressed on the couple, “we were in such a state of love that the very idea of leaving her appalled me . . . and it was mutual.” They were dancing to “Stardust” one night in early 1942 when Haley asked Nan to marry him. “Sure,” she answered. It was, Haley recalled, “a kind of marrying time for military people.”

But before they married, he took her to Henning to meet his family. By 1942, Simon had moved to Arkansas A&M in Pine Bluff, but Zeona had left him there to teach at LeMoyne College in Memphis, and after that they lived apart. When she met Nan, Zeona took the opportunity to warn her that marrying Alex would be the worst mistake she ever made. Nonetheless, the two got married in North Carolina, with Haley using his last four dollars to pay the minister. They lived together long enough for Nan to become pregnant with their first child, Lydia, born in 1943. Alex Haley had gotten married at age twenty without much sense of marital responsibility, without much experience when it came to women, and probably without a good example of a successful marriage to guide his behavior. He could not remember much about his grandparents' loving marriage. His parents' union had seen difficult circumstances, with Bertha's bad health and Simon's frequent moves. Simon's marital relations with Zeona were marked by acrimony; she freely expressed her distaste for Simon to Nannie Branche.
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In September 1941, in anticipation of war, Coast Guard personnel were put under the naval command. Not long afterward, when the United States entered the war, Haley was shipped to California, and in 1943 he was assigned to a supply ship, the
Murzim,
which carried shells and ammunition to the South Pacific. The crew of 250 was white except for eight blacks and eight Filipinos in the mess. The
Murzim
left San Francisco in July 1943 and arrived a month later at the island of New Caledonia, off the eastern coast of Australia. Haley was aboard the ship for eighteen months as it ferried supplies to Australia, New Zealand, New Hebrides, the Fiji Islands, the Solomon Islands, New Guinea, and the Philippines.

It was hazardous duty, though men on the
Murzim
thought little of it, Haley later said, after the first days at sea, when every whitecap sent tremors of fear about Japanese submarines. The crew was forced at one point to abandon the ship when a fire broke out on board and threatened to result in a catastrophic explosion. Indeed, that happened on the
Murzim
's sister cargo ship, the
Mount Hood,
whose explosion in 1944 killed nearly the whole crew. Haley's big problem during the long nights at sea was not fear but loneliness and boredom. He had made the fateful decision to take a portable typewriter on his Pacific service, and he got into the nightly habit of writing letters to family, schoolmates, and even to teachers. “It wasn't uncommon at every mail call for me to receive maybe 30 or 40 letters,” he recalled. Shipmates took notice.

Haley's boss on the
Murzim
was Steward First Class Percival L. Scott, a black, twenty-five-year veteran of the Coast Guard, a man whose height and breadth dwarfed Alex's. Their relationship was tense at first. Haley said that Scott was “a hostile old sea dog from the day I entered his galley.” Scott once looked down at Haley with a smirk and said in his growling bass voice: “Us bein' the same race ain't gon' get you by. Damn civilians done ruint the service.” Haley saw a letter that Scott wrote to his wife: “Haley he the steward second-class, supposed to be my assistant. Ben to college and can tiperite but schur is stooped. Can't boil water.”

At first Haley's nighttime typing in the pantry annoyed Scott. But “after haranguing me all day,” Haley later said, Scott “was irresistibly lured to watch me ‘tiperite.' I'd make the portable rattle, certain it angered him that a subordinate had a skill he hadn't.” But after a time, it emerged that Scott had thought of how he might deploy Haley's skill. “Looker here, boy, you ever seen the Cap'n talk letters to his yeoman?” The yeoman took shorthand, but Scotty thought that was unnecessary. “Fast as you run that thing, you might make a yeoman. I'll help you practice; I'll talk you some letters.” Haley's initial response was dismissive, since “the idea of this ungrammatical clown hijacking my offtime to dictate to me was hilarious.” Scott replied: “You're real wise, ain't you?” The next day Scott ran Haley ragged with orders to shine steam kettles and scrub garbage cans. Haley realized that he could resist Scott further and perhaps end up in the brig, or he could type Scott's letters. “You got the message?” Scott asked, to which a still-angry but conflict-shy Haley nodded. “You a smart boy.”
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That night Scott followed Haley to the pantry. Scott's first letter was to an old colleague on another ship. “I typed one garbled, ungrammatical cliché after another,” Haley recalled, and then Scott signed it as though “it were the Emancipation Proclamation.” The next morning Scott assembled five mess boys, telling them, “Never forget, Haley give order, it's the same as me!” From then on, Haley was free of drudgery in the mess, and every night he typed letters. Eventually, Scott arranged for Haley to spend time on the bridge of the ship, where he learned to read flags and blinker lights, thus gathering war news that he reported to Scott. Then Scott would “predict” the next big happening in the war.

Scott had appointed himself officer in charge of sailors' morale. His gruff demeanor belied a tender concern about the happiness of all the men, black and white, on the
Murzim.
He got angry when a young seaman received a “Dear John” letter from a girl back home. One night he brought an upset sailor to Haley and demanded that Haley read the break-up letter. “I'm goin' to set her straight,” Scott told Haley, and he began dictating a letter to the miscreant girl. “Here I set on a ship full of 500-pound bombs in a ocean full of subs and sharks. You don't even wait to see if I get back. I bet you grabbed some disanimated 4-F. It ought to be him out here doin' your fightin' and dyin'.” A mortified Haley typed it all, and it would not be the last time Scott's tongue and Haley's typewriter lashed an unfaithful woman. At the next port of call, recipients of break-up letters began to get missives of repentance and pleas for forgiveness.

With Scott's sponsorship, Haley began writing and publishing the ship's newspaper, the
Seafarer,
a mimeographed sheet of news, human interest stories, and jokes. He wrote an admiring description of the work of the Seabees, the naval construction force: “Born of thousands of veterans of hundred-odd industrial trades that would net them top-flight salaries in civilian life today, the Seabees who volunteered in silent aid of their country's cause have proven their worth time and time again under conditions that, to say the least, are too often unpleasant. . . . Murzimites know them best for their cargo handling techniques, at that, they're superb.”
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Scott watched the
Murzim
's irregular mail calls carefully. He knew when a sailor had lost a girlfriend or was being neglected by his family. He pointed out two crewmen to Haley. “Poor guys don't never get no mail.” Scott ordered Haley to get the neglected sailors listed in pen-pal ads. These crewmen suddenly began to get letters. In the
Seafarer,
Haley wrote a poignant article titled “Mail Call,” which he intended not just for the crew but also for folks back home. The story's scene was set with the ship's loudspeaker booming for sailors to come to the number three hatch. Haley recounted the chatter on the stairwells up to the deck:

Geez, I sure hope I hear from Mom today . . .

I wanna hear from Jean.

I didn't get any mail the last two calls . . .

I just wanna hear from somebody, that's all.

When the mail sacks were opened, names were called. “Jones . . . Barker . . . Taylor.” Men pressed forward toward the caller. Then Haley shifted his lens to the outer limits of the group, where men kept their eyes, full of hope, on the caller's lips, but “always their faces drop after each name.” Everyone knew which sailors usually did not get mail, and when one of them happened to get a letter, a cheer went up. Afterward the lucky ones hung about sharing pictures received from home, but the unlucky left with their heads down. “They manage a brave smile if they see you watching . . . but if you'll notice, the smile fades quickly and maybe they'll amble over to the rail and look out over the side, at the sea and the horizon.” They never looked toward land but always out at the ocean—“the direction home is in.” Haley concluded with an admonition: “Now, folks back home, is he someone you should be writing to?” Keep our mail bags full, Haley promised, and “we'll do the rest.” Many crewmen did, in fact, send “Mail Call” home, and it was reprinted in hundreds of stateside newspapers. For years afterward Haley was identified as the fellow who wrote “Mail Call.”
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Haley's writing in the
Seafarer
revealed that he had excellent instincts for public relations. He had a gift for describing a scene and setting a mood. Indeed, his work reflected remarkable skill for an untrained and mostly inexperienced writer.