Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, February 11, 1992 TAG: 9202110273
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: From staff and wire reports
DATELINE: KNOXVILLE, TENN. LENGTH: Long
HALEY WAS WARM, CARING AND UNCHANGED BY FAME
Alex Haley drew his gift of storytelling from the voices of his youth, and the echoes from the family porch in western Tennessee stayed with him all his life.His talent made him wealthy, famous and much-loved.
Whether a boyhood friend, a neighboring farmer, the literary elite or powerful politicians, all remembered Haley as an author whose works gave a wider understanding of what it meant to be black in America. He died Monday in Seattle, at age 70.
His childhood memories influenced Haley to write "Roots: The Saga of an American Family," the seminal chronicle tracing his ancestors back to a village in West Africa in the 18th century.
The book, which won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1977 and made him rich, and the subsequent television miniseries were credited with sensitizing many Americans to the horrors endured by their black compatriots under slavery. It also created a wave of interest in genealogy among people of all races.
Haley spent 12 years writing and researching "Roots," traveling half a million miles, talking with a tribal historian in Gambia, and poring over papers in more than 50 libraries on three continents.
As part of his research, Haley booked passage on a freighter from West Africa to the United States, sleeping each night in the hold of the ship on a board between bales of raw rubber.
He said he wanted to imagine what it was like "to lie there in chains, in filth, hearing the cries of 139 other men screaming, babbling, praying and dying around you."
Asked if he had ever anticipated the book or the miniseries' success, Haley replied: "No. If I had, I'd have typed a whole lot faster."
"One of my friends said what Alex Haley did is the black man's equivalent of putting a man on the moon," said Charles Johnson, whose novel "Middle Passage" detailed the gruesome voyage of a slave ship.
The voices came back to Haley in small ways, too.
In the mid-1980s, he went searching for a house in Tennessee. John Rice Irwin, a neighboring farmer and friend who accompanied him, said Haley looked at a mansion with "each room more lavish than the last" and a dining room "covered in gold."
By that point, Haley was laughing.
"I was just thinking what my grandmother would say," Irwin recalled him saying. "She'd say, `Son, has you done lost all your mind?'
"He said he knew then he couldn't buy that place," Irwin said.
Haley's unassuming nature, his warmth and his empathy were recounted again and again Monday by people who knew him.
"He was known everywhere in this world," said Lamar Alexander the U.S. secretary of education and a friend for a decade. "What I think best of him was that, famous as he was, he seemed to have time at home for every single one of us. I think that was his most important contribution."
When Haley visited Virginia Tech last year, he found time to visit a writers' group at the Warm Hearth Village Retirement Community in Blacksburg. Frances Brown, 83, said Haley impressed the group and encouraged them with their own writing. The writers' group, led by poet and Virginia Tech professor Nikki Giovanni, has since published a book of their writings.
"He encouraged us," Brown said. "He was a really great writer to take the time to talk to us elderly people, many of whom had never written anything in our lives before."
Irwin recalled one time when the author disappeared during a lunch in New York with the editor of a national magazine and a number of celebrities.
"Someone looked back in the kitchen and he was signing autographs for all the cooks," he said.
"The interesting thing about Roots," Irwin said, "is that for the very first time so many people saw blacks not in a nebulous kind of way, but as children, as loving mothers and grandmothers, as fathers, as a family."
Fred Montgomery, a boyhood friend and now mayor of Henning, Tenn., where Haley grew up, called him "the kind of person that would make you think that you were the celebrity and not him. He would reach down and help the poorest and smallest person."
The stories told by Haley's grandmother and great-aunts led him to trace his mother's side of the family back six generations.
As a speaker, he loved to tell audiences of those boyhood days when those "gray-haired grandmotherly ladies" in their front-porch rocking chairs would dip snuff and swap stories about Chicken George, a cockfighter; Kunta Kinte, Haley's great-great-great-great grandfather; Kinte's slavery mentor, Fiddler; or other colorful family members.
Haley, who said he was never much of a student and often embarrassed his father with his grades, enlisted in the Coast Guard in 1939.
"I specialized in leftovers," he would say of his Coast Guard cooking career. "I could make anything taste better the third day than it did the first day."
He discovered a talent for writing about that time and would write love letters for the other sailors for 50 cents.
Haley served 20 years in the military before starting a magazine-writing career.
His first book, "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," sprang out of a series of Playboy interviews Haley conducted with the Black Muslim leader who was assassinated in 1965. That book sold more than 6 million copies in eight languages.
He also had a famous Playboy interview with George Lincoln Rockwell, then the leader of the American Nazis.
Haley said in a 1988 interview that he was able to become a writer because his father had by sweat and determination worked his way out of sharecropping for white farmers.
"I was a sailor, I was a cook and this and that, and it might be said I was bootstrapped up to being a writer, but the real bootstrapping was that which preceded me," he said.
Haley's father worked four odd jobs to support himself while he attended high school and college. He later became a railroad porter. A passenger who learned of the financial troubles he was having volunteered to pay his college expenses at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, and Haley's father went on to become dean of agriculture at four different colleges.
After the publication of "Malcolm X," Haley was given the first of 37 honorary doctorate degrees, from Howard University.
Haley said he couldn't wait to take his father to the award ceremony, but the older man wasn't impressed.
"Typical of my father, he said it wasn't earned."
Although born in the North, Haley never lost his love for the South.
"I find that Southern-born people, white or black, tend to be better-raised than people from other sections," Haley once said. "Grandma taught me like that. I don't do everything she'd want me to do, but I don't get too far afield of her."
Haley said his grandmother would not have approved of obscenities or sex scenes, so "Roots" had neither.
In 1983, Haley bought 127 acres near Norris, 20 miles north of Knoxville in the rolling green of Appalachia. He put it up for sale for $1.25 million last month, saying he wanted to devote more time to writing.
There wasn't much there, just a dilapidated farm house the cows were calling home. Haley refurbished it, built guest cabins so his visitors would have a place to stay and a small conference center so they'd have a place to meet.
Herman Golub, his editor at Doubleday, said Haley could write only at sea because he would get too distracted on land.
"At sea, I will work from 10 at night until daybreak," Haley told one interviewer. "Then comes that magic moment when you start to dream about what you are writing, and you know that you are really into it."
Information for this story came from the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, and staff writer Melanie Hatter.
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