Alex Haley (25 page)

* * *

Being a best-selling author did not bring Alex Haley the peace and freedom that he had imagined. He had worked hard, struggled against formidable odds, treated most people well, and thought he deserved success. He did not disdain the expertise of academics, but neither did he believe he should be held accountable to their standards of objectivity when he was aiming for a higher, symbolic truth. He believed that many critics simply wanted to deflate someone whose celebrity had grown large, and he was right about that. In some instances, the provocation for disparaging him was simply racial prejudice. But it was also true that he had made a fundamental mistake in proclaiming the historicity of
Roots
when he knew that the book was not, at least in some of its parts, strictly true. His account of his use of
The African
was not plausible, in the view of many observers. Did the alleged misrepresentations warrant the onslaught of attacks he was enduring? Were they so grievous as to rightly undo the salutary effects of
Roots
on the American popular mind? No, they were not, but in the world of American celebrity, fair and correct judgments often do not prevail.

11

Find the Good and Praise It

The Ottaway exposé and the copyright suits left scars on Haley. His old friend Leonard Jeffries, with whom he had worked on a black genealogy project in the early 1970s, described him as “shell-shocked.” Haley had won all the suits except one that he had settled, but he took no consolation from that. “The one who really lost was me,” he said, because what the public remembered was not the substance of the findings in the cases but that he was sued. “What I learned was if you're fortunate enough to do anything that becomes highly acclaimed, especially if it makes money, you can almost bet that somebody is going to come along and say, ‘You took something from me,'” he told the
New York Times.
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Haley had settled the Courlander case because he wanted to salvage his reputation, but he did not really succeed, in part because of the inconsistent way that America's celebrity culture dealt with accusations of plagiarism. In 1989 Thomas Mallon, a noted writer of historical fiction, published
Stolen Words,
an analysis of several leading cases of alleged plagiarism—although not Haley's. “It seems plagiarism is something people get off with scot-free or it's a career killer, the single thing they're known for,” Mallon said years later. “What we need . . . is a certain proportionality.” Whether “somebody takes a kind of delight in an icon's being reduced to a bum in the space of a week, ought to be factored into people's reputations. It should diminish our overall estimation of him, but we should not run him out of the human race.” Haley saw a reputation for plagiarism as a possible “career killer.”
2

Accusations of plagiarism were a phenomenon common in Hollywood, where Haley lived from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. The financial stakes were higher and much was to be gained from claiming theft of intellectual property. There, such accusations did not carry the same opprobrium that they did in intellectual and literary circles in New York. A number of successful films—
Nosferatu,
A Fistful of Dollars,
Rocky,
Coming to America,
and
The Terminator
—were allegedly based on misappropriated ideas. In Hollywood, the victim whose intellectual property was poached was often well compensated for it after the fact. Such settlements were seen as merely the cost of doing business in the entertainment industry. Most people in Hollywood understood the Courlander case as Haley's cost of fame.

It was ironic that, while Alex Haley was dealing with the accusations of factual inaccuracy and copyright infringement in 1977 and 1978, he was also working on another, and some thought better, recounting of his family's past. In long interviews with producers and scriptwriters that were far easier for him to render than a book, he supplied information for
Roots: The Next Generations,
broadcast in early 1979. The miniseries was fourteen hours long (two hours longer than the original
Roots
) and was shown over seven consecutive nights. The production cost $18 million, three times as much as the first
Roots.
It followed Haley's family from the 1880s through World War II, which was the time covered in the last thirty pages of
Roots,
and then touched on the decades that followed, culminating in Haley's trip to Africa. As in the first
Roots
broadcast, white characters were created who had not appeared in the book, but here they were necessary to develop important themes about race relations and to tell the true story of the black experience after Reconstruction. Much of it adhered to the facts Alex had made well known since the 1960s, including his troubled marriage to Nan. But it also contained many new characters, mostly whites, and scenes created just for television that filled out the narrative of black history from Emancipation in the 1860s to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

“
Roots
II” emphasized several new themes. It explored the ways that race complicated romantic love among blacks and between blacks and whites, suggested mostly with characters not present in Haley's writing. It created an unlikely interracial marriage between a white planter's son and a well-educated black teacher in Henning. The series rendered in realistic scenes the ugliness of post-Reconstruction race relations, including segregation, the convict-leasing system, lynching, disenfranchisement, the persistent racism of working-class whites, and the amorality and arrogance of white paternalism, portrayed chillingly by Henry Fonda. It captured the demeaning compromises that blacks had to make to survive in the white supremacist South. It took the narrative of black history through the important events of the twentieth century, covering the nuances of white supremacist customs; the exploitation of the sharecropping system; the conflict between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois; the discrimination against blacks in the U.S. Army; the racial terrorism in American cities after the war; the rise of the all-black Pullman porters union; and the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. White hatred provided the main tension of the plot, but there were enough conflicts in the Haley family saga to keep the momentum of the series rolling. A few benevolent whites were inserted in the story to relieve the otherwise unrelenting malevolence of the dominant majority. There were some false steps in the plot. The writers devoted almost a whole episode to white bigots in Alabama in the 1930s who were violently enforcing exploitation of black sharecroppers over Simon Haley's fierce opposition. Such violence existed, although not where the script located it, and there was no evidence in Alex Haley's research that Simon was involved in anything like it. This part of the story contradicted what was known about Simon's personality. The last episodes, focusing on Alex's rise as a writer, felt slow and a lot like typical television melodrama. The history lessons seemed more forced than in the earlier episodes. So, too, did the recalling in each episode, almost by rote it seemed, of the Kunta Kinte heritage.

“
Roots
II” had a large cast of black actors. The main male characters—Tom Murray, Will Palmer, and Simon Haley—were played as overburdened men, without much texture, although all were on screen for long stretches. Most important, the miniseries dispensed entirely with Simon's extroverted, crowd-loving nature. On the other hand, several of the smaller parts were played brilliantly: Ossie Davis as a Pullman porter, Bernie Casey as a World War I soldier, and Paul Winfield as a black college president stole their respective scenes. James Earl Jones, Haley's old friend, played Haley as a grown man. Donald Bogle found Jones unconvincing because he “overacted”; he made Haley more demonstrative than he was in fact, especially in the expression of anger. But when Beah Richards as Cynthia Palmer spoke to Alex about his ancestors, Bogle thought “her power and convictions lifted the drama completely out of TV land.” He concluded that, in contrast to the way actors in the first series “pushed for big emotions and big emotional responses from the audience . . . the sequel was frequently a quieter drama focusing partly on class struggle and espousing the American work ethic and a belief in the American Dream.” More white star actors filled the cast of “
Roots
II” than were in its predecessor. Henry Fonda as a former Confederate colonel, Olivia de Havilland as his wife, Andy Griffith as Alex's helpful Coast Guard commander, and Marlon Brando as the American Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell raised the illustriousness of the cast higher than that of the white actors in the first series. Brando, having recently starred in
The Godfather,
had begged for a part, and his few minutes on screen were riveting.
3

Airing from February 19 to February 25, 1979,
Roots: The Next Generations
was viewed by one hundred and ten million Americans, just twenty million fewer viewers than the first miniseries. It got better reviews.
Newsweek
said it was “richer in physical sweep and psychological shadings, graced with acting seldom seen on the tube.” The reviewer in the
New York Post
said it was “a fuller, sweeter, more agonizing story, and its conflicts cut deeper into our twentieth century sensibility.” Whereas the first series was largely the story of a rebellious black man challenging white authority, “
Roots
II” focused on blacks' accepting American values about progress and success. The overarching message, as in the first
Roots,
was the continuity of survival and hope in black families.
4

The judgments of historians made decades later matter less in evaluating the historical significance of the series than the impact when it aired. “
Roots
II” completed Haley's “saga of a people” on television, and with the help of David Wolper, he had given more than a hundred million Americans a new understanding of the black experience in the United States. Together the two
Roots
miniseries had filled in huge gaps in the public's knowledge of black history, and it had given Americans vivid images that would enable them to hold on to that new awareness.

* * *

Both
Roots
series were autobiographical, and so was Haley's next television production,
Palmerstown, USA,
a weekly series that ran in 1980 and 1981 and comprised seventeen episodes. Haley collaborated with the producer Norman Lear, who had enjoyed great success in the 1970s with several television series, most notably
All in the Family.
Haley suggested the plots of the episodes and collaborated on some scripts.
Palmerstown
finally realized the plot and themes of the novel “The Lord and Little David,” which Haley had begun writing in the early 1950s and tried to get published well into the 1960s. It incorporated the original presumption of “Before This Anger,” that there was a time in the South, the 1930s, when blacks and whites got along more amicably than they would in the 1960s.
Palmerstown
drew on Haley's life, but it was not as explicitly autobiographical as the two
Roots
miniseries. He named the town after a branch of his family and modeled it on Henning. The main premise of the series, a relationship between two boys in a southern town during the Great Depression, was also personal. Haley had had a white friend in Henning, Kermit, with whom he spent much time until age twelve. That relationship had ended badly, when Kermit tried to assert his supposed racial superiority over Haley. In
Palmerstown,
the boys remain friends throughout the course of the story.

Haley's notes for the scripting of
Palmerstown,
provided to guide writers, revealed his understanding of the sociology of the South: “This series reaches for something deep within the American culture which has not been accurately portrayed.” It focused on two of “America's most bedrock” groups, each of them exploited—blacks and poor whites. Haley put these groups side by side in a small town, much like Henning, that comprised five hundred folks evenly divided by race. “One of the secrets of small towns is they contain no anonymous individuals, as cities do,” Haley wrote. “Anyone who is raised in a small town can tell you something singular, something salient, about everyone else.” One telling instruction to the writers was not to “belabor racial inequities.” A recent docudrama about Martin Luther King Jr.'s career had done that, which was why, Haley said, it had failed with white audiences. “Deal obliquely with race matters; as
Roots
did, permit viewers to derive their own subjective editorials.”
5

In
Palmerstown,
black Booker T. Freeman and white David Hall are sons of a blacksmith and a grocer, respectively. The two boys observe the racial tensions among adults. The boys' fathers argue over a grocery bill, and the tension trickles down to them. Racial epithets are thrown about. The series explored the theme of class through the way that poor whites were the source of conflict in Palmerstown; it continued the persistent theme in Haley's work of the strength of black families. Each episode developed a crisis in the town and then resolved it. The series was nostalgic about the South of the 1930s and romantic in its treatment of racial issues. Donald Bogle insisted that the show ignored the ugly realities of the segregated South and the abiding cultural distinctions that sustained blacks. But even if it was a much less satisfying program than “
Roots
II,” Bogle thought that black audiences would be happy to watch another black drama, especially if it came from Alex Haley.
6

By the end of
Palmerstown
's run, Americans had been given forty-three hours of Alex Haley's family history on television in four years. Such attention won him great admiration among many Americans, especially blacks, who as a group knew that television had slighted them before Haley came along. His stories treated the black experience seriously, whereas such popular programs as
Good Times,
in which the actor Jimmie Walker often shouted “Dy-no-MITE!” were seen by many as demeaning blacks.

Haley had moved on from
Roots
to celebrate equality in American life and good human relations in the South, but his largest impact on American culture probably was his encouragement of black nationalism. The black media critic Herman Gray believed that
Roots
had enabled discourse on blackness in a way that caused the “rearticulation of the discourse of Afrocentric nationalism.” Gray thought the work had also brought about a renewed interest in black studies and the development of “African-centered rap and black urban style.”
Roots
encouraged a racial nationalist temper in the archetype of Kunta Kinte. The rappers Lil Wayne and Missy Elliott made reference to Kunta Kinte in song. Filmmakers John Singleton and Spike Lee referred to Kunta in
Boyz n the Hood
and
Do the Right Thing,
respectively.
7