Alex Haley: A Curious Enigma
Alexander Murray Palmer Haley, the late American writer who produced two of the most successful, and controversial, works in African-American history, was born in Icatha, New York in 1921.
The son of agricultural professor, Simon Haley, and his wife, Bertha, Haley initially seemed destined to follow in his father’s footsteps in academia. However, after underperforming academically, Haley enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard in 1939. During this time, Haley, famously, honed his literary craft when he began ghost-writing love-letters for his shipmates. Consequently, Haley’s talent led him to become the U.S. Coast Guard’s first Chief Journalist.
Eventually, in 1959, Haley retired from the Coast Guard to become a full-time writer, enjoying early success as a leading interviewer for Playboy. His interviews with Miles Davis, Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali and, infamously, George Lincoln Rockwell, proved to be the groundwork for Haley’s first major literary success, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), which Haley co-authored with the black power leader. The book became a best-seller though, remarkably, Haley’s biggest moment was still to come.
During his childhood in Henning, Tennessee, Haley heard treasured family stories about his antebellum slave ancestors, notably the “African”, who Haley would later describe as “my furthest-back person”. The writer’s next project, a novel entitled Before This Anger, evolved, after years of frenzied research, rewriting and revising, into Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976), which chronicled Haley’s family story from its origins in West Africa, through slavery, civil war and reconstruction, to the present. Haley’s search into his ancestral story led him to an African village in The Gambia, which he claimed to be the birthplace of his alleged African ancestor. According to Haley, a griot from the village identified his folkloric forebear as Kunta Kinte, a young Mandinka warrior, born in 1750, who had been captured by slave traders. To confirm that Kinte was his ancestor, Haley reported that the griot had confirmed the same family story he heard as a boy on his grandmother’s front-porch – that the “African” was captured when he went to chop wood to make a drum. Haley had the link he needed for a literary sensation.
Upon its much-anticipated, and much-delayed publication, Roots sparked a cultural phenomenon. The novel spent 22 weeks at number one on The New York Times Best Seller List, earned Haley a Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into a record-breaking TV mini-series. The Roots phenomenon brought the slave trade to the forefront of public attention and ignited a worldwide craze in genealogy. It also made Haley, the one-time college dropout, the most successful author in US literary history.
Roots, and Haley’s subsequent fame, also caused considerable controversy. Sunday Times journalist Mark Ottoway challenged Haley’s story and the validity of his research. In addition, Haley was accused by anthropologist Harold Courlander of plagiarising his 1967 novel, The African, which resulted in an out-of-court settlement by Haley.
The allegations of falsfication, plagiarism and, additionally, historical inaccuracy, marred the prominence of Alex Haley and Roots within academia. Haley’s work was not included in the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature, whilst the abashed author would only publish one more book, A Different Kind of Christmas (1988), in his lifetime. Despite the controversy over Roots, Haley did begin work on a second family history chronicle, Alex Haley’s Queen: The Story of an American Family (1992), completed posthumously by David Stevens, which concluded the Roots saga by exploring the story of his father’s family.
Alex Haley died from a heart attack in Seattle on 10th February 1992. He remains a curious enigma, heavily-criticised by detractors yet fondly-remembered and appreciated by many, whose credentials and work sharply divide opinion. Indeed, only recently have scholarly reapprisals of Haley’s work began to emerge, aiming to redress the balance that has slipped significantly since the Roots heyday.
Whatever the stance on Haley, his work nonetheless, resulted in a true phenomena, which had a huge impact in literature, television, popular history and in the lives of millions around the world.
