Haley's Rx: Talk, Write, Reunite

"If I had been taking hashish, I could not have dreamed of this." In the fashionable Los Angeles community of Cheviot Hills, every mail brings bulging sacks of letters to Alex Haley--all of it evidence of the astonishing impact produced by his saga of a black family's tortuous trail to freedom. Haley thinks he knows why Roots touched all America. In an interview last week with TIME Correspondent William Marmon, he explained his own theory of the Roots phenomenon and told how he came to write the book.

"In this country," says Alex Haley, "we are young, brash and technologically oriented. We are all trying to build machines so that we can push a button and get things done a millisecond faster. But as a consequence, we are drawing away from one of the most priceless things we have--where we came from and how we got to be where we are. The young are drawing away from older people."

Haley quickly grants that television can be "a positive social influence" --how could he not?--but then goes on to castigate the tube for widening the generation gap. "TV has contributed to killing off the old form of entertainment where the family sat around listening to older people. TV has alienated youth from its elders, and this has cost us culturally and socially."

So has the trend toward divided family units that isolate the aged, he says. "Just look at the scores of thousands of housing tracts in this country, where only parents and children live. Think of the impact on these children who will grow up without close proximity to grandparents. There are certain things that a grandmammy or a granddaddy can do for a child that no one else can. It's sort of like Stardust--the relationship between grandparents and children. The lack of this for many children has to have a negative impact on society. The edges of these children are a little sharper for the lack of it." The universal appeal of Roots, he concludes, is based on the average American's longing for a sense of heritage.

Magic Bond. Haley even goes so far as to advocate an antidote to this trend toward rootlessness. Young people can "revolutionize" their own role within their families, he says, and he offers them a three-point prescription. "I tell young people to go to the oldest members of their family and get as much oral history as possible. Many grandparents carry three or four generations of history in their heads but don't talk about it because they have been ignored. And when the young person starts doing this, the old are warmed to the cockles of their souls and will tell a grandchild everything they can muster."

Then, Haley says, the history of the family should be written and a copy sent to every member. Haley encourages youths to rummage through attics, basements and closets for illuminating family letters and other memorabilia. "It's a simple thing," says Haley. "But the existence of a written history gives the family something it never had before. There is an almost miraculous effect once it exists." Finally, Haley urges, "have family reunions. There is something magic about the common sense of a blood bond. It's not less magic for black, white, brown or polka dot. The reunion gives a sense that the family cares about itself and is proud of itself. And there is the assumption that you, the family member, are obligated to reflect this pride and, if possible, add to it."

Writing Cook. Because Roots is a black family reunion of sorts, Haley sees some distinct differences in why whites and blacks are so attracted by it. Discounting speculation that his work would unleash black rage, Haley says, "I've not heard one murmur of radicalization from blacks. I have heard ebullience and happiness that the story has been told. The blacks who are buying books are not buying them to go out and fight someone, but because they want to know who they are. Roots is all of our stories. It's the same for me or any black. It's just a matter of filling in the blanks--which person, living in which village, going on what ship, across the same ocean, slavery, emancipation, the struggle for freedom." Now, Haley says, "some very important things are happening among young blacks. The generation of the 1960s was so quick to label all older blacks as 'Uncle Toms.' Roots has helped turn this around. People come up and thank me for making them go back to their parents and elders. And I tell young people to go home and hug their grandma and grandpap.

"The white response is more complicated. But when you start talking about family, about lineage and ancestry, you are talking about every person on earth. We all have it; it's a great equalizer. White people come up to me and tell me that Roots has started them thinking about their own families and where they came from. I think the book has touched a strong, subliminal pulse."

The origin of Roots is the very kind of storytelling Haley lauds. While a boy hi Henning, Tenn., he first learned of the "furthest-back person" his grandmother talked about--Kunta Kinte. Says Haley: "Grandmother would bubble with pride about 'Chicken George' [Haley's great-great-grandfather], but when telling about Kunta Kinte, her voice would fill with awe, like she was talking about a Bible story." Haley's college-educated parents were teachers, his mother in the local elementary school and his father at black colleges in the South. Haley took books out of libraries "like lollipops" but found no such sweetness in school. Graduating with a C average from high school at the age of 15, he attended college for two years and then in 1939 enlisted in the Coast Guard.

As a matter of course, he was shunted into the steward's department. Recounts Haley: ''I was on an ammunition ship in the southwest Pacific, and the big problem was boredom and loneliness. I had never thought of being a writer, but I wrote lots and lots of letters. And crew members began to come to me for help in writing love letters. I got pretty good at this, and before long it kinda got to be I didn't have to cook any more. I just wrote love letters." While copying passages from a book (he cannot remember which one), "I felt for the first time what good professional writing feels like. I got the yen to see if I couldn't do the same thing."

Haley collected hundreds of rejection slips before he finally sold his first piece to This Week, a syndicated Sunday supplement. Before long he was known as "the cook who writes," and by the time he retired from the Coast Guard in 1959 at the age of 37, he had attained the rank of chief journalist. Though he had served for 20 years, he received no pension checks--those went to one of his two former wives.

Hanging In. Haley moved into a basement apartment in New York City's Greenwich Village and tried to support himself as a freelance writer. "Everyone I knew was saying 'Writing is nice, but why don't you get a job?' I owed everyone. One day a friend called with a civil service job that paid $6,000 a year. I turned it down. I wanted to make it writing. My friend banged the phone down. I owed him too. I took psychic inventory. I looked in the cupboard, and there were two cans of sardines, marked two for 210. I had 180 in my pocket. That's all I had in the world. There was nowhere to go but up. I put the sardines and the 180 in a sack and said to myself that I'd keep them there. And the next day I got a check for a piece I'd written." Today the coins and cans are mounted in a collage that hangs in Haley's library--an artful reminder of how it feels "hanging in there when you didn't know what would happen."

Haley began getting regular assignments from the Reader's Digest and later Playboy, where he inadvertently created that magazine's monthly interview format while doing a piece on Jazz Trumpeter Miles Davis. Another of his subjects was Black Muslim Leader Malcolm X, which led to his first book. Published in 1965, The Autobiography of Malcolm X became a 6-million-copy bestseller.

Two weeks after finishing the Malcolm X manuscript, Haley wandered into the National Archives Building in Washington. The family history, told and retold by his grandma, still intrigued him. "The Kinte story, which had been passed down by many generations of slaves, was not elaborate. It was really very simple. But it was the story around which whole generations coalesced. It kept us together. It made us proud of who we were and from where we had come." Haley asked a clerk in the microfilm room for the 1870 census records of Alamance County, N.C., where his forebears had lived. As he recalls the day, "It became sort of a mystical experience, turning those reels of film." But after a couple of eye-straining hours, he got up to leave. "As I walked out through the genealogical reading room, I noticed sort of peripherally that unlike the usual library scene where people are lolling around, here the people were intently bent over the books and tables. The thought popped into my head that these people were trying to find out who they were. I turned around and went back into the microfilm room."

About an hour later, Haley discovered what he wanted. "Suddenly I found myself looking down: Tom Murray, Occupation--blacksmith,' and beneath him, 'Irene, M--for Mulatto,' and their children. The youngest was Elizabeth, age six. And that really grabbed me. That was Aunt Liz. I used to sit on her front porch and play with her long gray hair. The experience galvanized me. Grandma's words became real. It wasn't that I had not believed her. You just didn't not believe Grandma. But there was something about the fact that what Grandma had been talking about was right there on U.S. Government records in the National Archives, along with the Bill of Rights, the Constitution and everything else."

Haley's twelve years of research and writing on Roots had begun. In retrospect, Haley firmly believes it was more than his own perseverance that got the book finished. "However this sounds," he says, "it was one of those things that God in his infinite wisdom and in his time and way decided should happen. I feel I'm a conduit through which this is happening. It was just something that was meant to be. I say this because there were so many things that had to happen over which I had no control. And if any one thing hadn't happened, then this could not have come together."

Success Model. Just as he forthrightly ponders the possibility of divine guidance, Haley is unabashedly thrilled with the riches that Roots has brought him. "It really startles me that the last thing I think of now is money." Though he plans only to buy a new stereo, a TV and a video-tape machine (to watch reruns of the series, among other things), Haley says, "The success in money terms is beyond imagination."

There is another reward too that pleases Haley: black children see him as a model for success. One stiff-braided little girl, brought with her class to meet Haley at a Los Angeles bookstore, said matter of factly, "I'm going to write a bigger book than you." Replied Haley: "Come on, honey, and do it."

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