Alex Haley - Roots - The Saga of an American Family

On later visits, Bertha began to speak about a young man whom she had met in the college choir, his name, Simon Alexander Haley, and he was from a town named Savannah, Tennessee. Being very poor, she said, he was working at as many as four odd jobs at the time in order to stay in school, where he was studying agriculture. When Bertha continued to talk about him, a year later, in 1913, Will and Cynthia suggested that she invite him to visit with them in Henning, so they could appraise him in person.

The New Hope CME Church was packed on the Sunday it had been circulated that “Bertha’s beau from college” would be in attendance. He arrived under the searching scrutiny not only of Will and Cynthia Palmer, but also of the total black community. But he seemed a very self-assured young man. After singing a baritone solo, “In the Garden,” accompanied by Bertha at the piano, he talked easily with all who crowded about him later out in the churchyard, he looked everyone squarely in the eyes, firmly gripping all of the men’s hands, and tipping his hat to all of the ladies.

Bertha and her Simon Alexander Haley—his full name—returned to Lane College together on the bus that evening. No one had a thing to say against him—publicly—in the ensuing community discussions. Privately, though, some queasy uncertainties were expressed concerning his very nearly high-yaller complexion. (He had told dark brown Bertha in confidence that his parents, former slaves, had both told him of having slave mothers and Irish white fathers, paternally an overseer named Jim Baugh, of whom little else was known, and maternally a Marion County, Alabama, plantation scion and later Civil War colonel named James Jackson.) But it was agreed by all that he sang well; that he seemed to have been well raised; and he showed no signs of trying to put on airs just because he was educated.

Haley landed a summer’s work as a Pullman porter, saving every possible penny to enable his transferring to the four-year A&T College in Greensboro, North Carolina, exchanging weekly letters with Bertha. When World War I came, he and all other males in their senior class enlisted en masse in the U. S. Army, and before long his letters to Bertha came from France, where in the Argonne Forest in 1918, he was gassed. After treatment for several months in a hospital overseas, he was returned home to convalesce, and in 1919, fully recovered, he came again to Henning and he and Bertha announced their engagement.

Their wedding in the New Hope CME Church in the summer of 1920 was Henning’s first social event attended by both black and white—not only since Will Palmer by now was among the town’s most prominent citizens, but also because in her own right the accomplished, irrepressible Bertha was someone whom all in Henning regarded with pride. The reception was held on the wide, sloping lawn of the Palmers’ brand-new home of ten rooms, including a music parlor and a library. A banquet of food was served; more presents were heaped than were normally seen at an average three weddings; there was even a recital by the full Lane College Choir—in whose ranks the ecstatic newlyweds had met—which had come in the bus that Will Palmer had chartered from Jackson.

Late that day, Henning’s little railroad depot was overrun as Simon and Bertha boarded the Illinois Central train that took them through the night to Chicago, where they changed onto another bound for somewhere called Ithaca, New York. Simon was going to study for his master’s degree in agriculture at some “Cornell University,” and Bertha would be enrolling at a nearby “Ithaca Conservatory of Music.”

For about nine months, Bertha wrote home regularly, reporting their exciting experiences so far away and telling how happy they were with each other. But then, in the early summer of 1921, Bertha’s letters began to arrive less and less often, until finally Cynthia and Will grew deeply concerned that something was wrong that Bertha wasn’t telling them about. Will gave Cynthia five hundred dollars to send to Bertha, telling Bertha to use it however they might need it, without mentioning it to Simon. But their daughter’s letters came even more seldom, until by late August, Cynthia told Will and their closest friends that she was going to New York herself to find out what was the matter.

Two days before Cynthia was due to leave, a midnight knocking at the front door awakened them in alarm. Cynthia was first out of bed, snatching on her robe, with Will close behind. At their bedroom’s doorway, she could see through the living room’s glasspaneled french doors the moonlit silhouettes of Bertha and Simon on the front porch. Cynthia went shrieking and bounding to snatch open the door.

Bertha said calmly, “Sorry we didn’t write. We wanted to bring you a surprise present—” She handed to Cynthia the blanketed bundle in her arms. Her heart pounding, and with Will gazing incredulously over her shoulder, Cynthia pulled back the blanket’s top fold—revealing a round brown face....

The baby boy, six weeks old, was me.

CHAPTER 118

Iused to be told later by Dad, laughing in recalling that night of big surprise as he loved to do, “Seemed I’d nearly lost a son a little while there—” Dad declared Grandpa Will Palmer walked around and lifted me out of Grandma’s arms “and without a word took you out to the yard and around the rear of the house somewhere. Why, he must have stayed gone I believe as long as half an hour” before returning, “with Cynthia, Bertha, or me saying not a word to him of it, either, I guess for one reason just because he was Will Palmer, and the other thing was all of us knew how badly for many years he’d wanted to have a son to raise—I guess in your being Bertha’s boy, you’d become it.”

After a week or so, Dad went back alone to Ithaca, leaving Mama and me in Henning; they had decided it would be better while he finished pushing for his master’s degree. Grandpa and Grandma proceeded to just about adopt me as their own—especially Grandpa.

Even before I could talk, Grandma would say years later, he would carry me in his arms, down to the lumber company, where he built a crib to put me in while he took care of business. After I had learned to walk, we would go together downtown, me taking three steps to each of his, my small fist tightly grasped about his extended left forefinger. Looming over me like a black, tall, strong tree, Grandpa would stop and chat with people we met along the way. Grandpa taught me to look anyone right in their eyes, to speak to them clearly and politely. Sometimes people exclaimed how well raised I was and how fine I was growing up. “Well, I guess he’ll do,” Grandpa would respond.

Down at the W. E. Palmer Lumber Company, he would let me play around among the big stacks of oak, cedar, pine, and hickory, all in planks of different lengths and widths, and with their mingling of good smells, and I would imagine myself involved in all kinds of exciting adventures, almost always in faraway times or places. And sometimes Grandpa would let me sit in his office in his big, high-backed swivel chair with his green-visored eyeshade on my head, swiveling around and back and forth until I’d get so dizzy my head seemed to keep going after I’d stopped. I enjoyed myself anywhere I ever went with Grandpa.

Then, when I was going on five, he died. I was so hysterical that Dr. Dillard had to give me a glass of something milky to make me sleep that night. But before I did, I remember drowsily glimpsing many people, black and white, gathering in a ragged line along the dusty road that ran nearby the house, all of their heads bowed, the women wearing headscarves, the men holding their hats in their hands. For the next several days, it seemed to me as if everybody in the world was crying.