Alex Haley - Roots - The Saga of an American Family

Roots was eventually published in thirty-seven languages. It won the 1977 National Book Award as well as a Pulitzer Prize and went on to become a landmark television miniseries in 1977. The book and film both reached unparalleled success. The television miniseries attracted a record-breaking 130 million viewers when it was serialized on television. The series set records for the number of viewers, and the Sunday night finale achieved the highest ranking for a single television production. Roots emphasized that African-Americans have a long history and that not all of that history is lost, as many had previously believed. Its popularity sparked an increased public interest in genealogy as well.

Roots and Alex Haley attracted controversy over the years—which comes with the territory of path-breaking iconic books, particularly on the topic of race. In 1978, novelist Harold Courlander sued Alex Haley, claiming that portions of Courlander’s novel The African had been plagiarized in Roots . After a trial, Haley settled out of court for $650,000 after admitting that several passages of Roots were copied from Courlander’s novel. However, Haley stated that the appropriation of these passages was unintentional and also claimed that researchers helping him had given him this material without citing the source. The settlement permitted the continued publication of Roots as Alex Haley wrote it. In 1988 Margaret Walker also sued him, claiming that Roots violated the copyright for her novel Jubilee . Her case was dismissed by the court.

There were also some questions about whether Roots was fact or fiction, and whether Alex Haley confused these two issues. Haley addressed these issues head-on in the book itself:To the best of my knowledge and of my effort, every lineage statement within Roots is from either my African or American families’ carefully preserved oral history, much of which I have been able conventionally to corroborate with documents. Those documents, along with the myriad textural details of what were contemporary indigenous lifestyles, cultural history, and such that give Roots flesh have come from years of intensive research in fifty-odd libraries, archives, and other repositories on three continents.Since I wasn’t around when most of the story occurred, by far most of the dialogue and most of the incidents are of necessity a novelized amalgam of what I know took place together with what my researching let me to plausibly feel took place.

Haley received the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal in 1977. Four thousand deans and department heads of colleges and universities throughout the country in a survey conducted by Scholastic Magazine selected Haley as America’s foremost achiever in the literature category. (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was selected in the religious category.) The ABC-TV network presented another series, Roots : The Next Generation , in February 1979 (also written by Haley). Roots had sold almost five million copies by December 1978 and had been reprinted in twenty-three languages.

Haley’s later literary projects included a history of the town of Henning, Tennessee, and a biography of Frank Wills, the security guard who discovered the Watergate break-in. In the television series Palmerstown, USA (1980), Haley collaborated with the producer Norman Lear. The series was based on Haley’s boyhood experiences in Henning.

A Different Kind of Christmas (1988) was a short novella, in which a slave manages to escape and as a result, the son of slaveholding southern parents slowly realizes that the practice of slavery is wrong. Then, in the late 1980s, Haley began working on a second historical novel based on another branch of his family, traced through his grandmother Queen—the daughter of a black slave woman and her white master. Queen (1993) was a strong epic novel, which focused on Simon Alexander Haley’s side of the family.

In 1987 Haley left his home in Beverly Hills, California, and moved to Tennessee, his family’s home state. Haley died of a heart attack on February 10, 1992, at the Swedish Hospital Medical Center in Seattle, Washington, before he could complete Queen . At his request, the novel was finished by David Stevens and was published as A lex Haley’s Queen . It was subsequently made into a movie in 1993.

Haley was posthumously awarded the Korean War Service Medal from the government of South Korea ten years after his death. This award, created in 1999, did not exist during Haley’s lifetime, but demonstrates how both his life and his legacy continue to impact the lives and works of people throughout the world to this day.

On October 10, 1991, Alex Haley gave a speech to the employees of Reader’s Digest that included information about the writing of Roots while traveling on freight ships. This is an excerpt from the live recording.

ALEX HALEY ON THE WRITING OF ROOTS

Reprinted by permission from Reader’s Digest.

There’s something about when you go out on a ship and usually, I go out on freight ships, cargo ships; I wouldn’t get caught on a liner. How can you write with 800 people dancing? But on the freight ships, not many of them carry passengers, but those which do carry passengers carry a total of twelve, a maximum of twelve people. The law is that if a ship carries more than twelve, it must have a doctor on board. So the people who go out there tend to be very quiet people. It is said, not too far amiss, that excitement on a cargo ship is when someone finishes a jigsaw puzzle.

But what I do is I go and work my principal work hours from about 10:30 at night until daybreak. The world is yours at that point. Most of all the passengers are asleep. Sometimes there are only three other people awake on the ship. On the bridge, the officer of the day and the helmsman, and the guy who makes the rounds punching clocks every hour, and you. The thing I particularly love is when you get in there and you’ve got all your notes and your research and stuff literally in the one room with you. It’s sometimes up on your bunk, and you sleep with it all by your feet. It’s a lovely feeling—like being in the womb with what you are trying to do. I find myself from time to time, when I’m writing, I’ll do things, visual things. I’ll remember you as an audience. I’ll remember what you look like as a group. And it’s just kind of nice. And I think, well, I want to write this thing so they will read this or they’ll print that. It just comes into your head, things like that.

You’re out there by yourself. When you get far enough along, you really start to talk with your characters. I had so many conversations with Chicken George and Kunta Kinte it wasn’t even funny. It was natural. I’m sitting up in my underwear, by myself, minding my business, talking with them. And that was just as routine as it could be. Come around about 1:30 in the morning—you’ve been working since 10:30 and decide you’re going to take a little break. So you get up and you walk up on the deck. And you put your hand on the top rail, your foot on the bottom rail, and you look up. The first most striking thing is, man, you look up and there are heavenly objects as you never saw them before. You find yourself looking at planets at sea. And what you start to realize is that you never saw clear air before—even out here where it’s clear compared to New York City. This is nowhere near like it is at sea. In some latitudes, down off West Africa, South America, on the night of a full moon, there are times when you get into an illusion. If you could just stretch a little further, you feel like you could touch it. And you are out there amidst all this, God’s firmament, and then you stand and you feel through the sole of your shoe a fine vibration and you realize that’s man at work. That’s a huge diesel turbine, thirty-five feet down under the water, driving this ship like a small island through the water. Still standing there now you start hearing a slight hissing sound. You realize that’s the skin of the ship cutting through the resistance of the ocean. With all that going on, feeling these man things and seeing the God things, that’s about as close to holy as you’re going to ever get.