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Books by Alex Haley
Roots: The Saga of an American Family /
Alex Haley's Queen /
A Different Kind of Christmas
Mama Flora's Family /
The Autobiography of Malcolm X /
Alex Haley: The Man Who
Traced America’s Roots
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Aboard the
African Star
By Alex
Haley
I just love to get out in the ocean.
You are really out there, thinking in ways you haven't
thought before. The best writing I ever possibly could
do was after The Digest helped me go to Africa
and Europe, and I was not known and I could just take my
time and nobody was pressing me. God, I don't know how
long it took me. I was working slowly, slowly. When I
had done all the research, nine years, working in
between doing articles for other magazines, I was ready
to write. I didn't know where to go, didn't know what to
do. I knew I had a monumental task. And I got on a cargo
ship. I went from Long Beach, California, completely
around South America and back to Long Beach. It was 91
days.
There's something about a ship.
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 the freight ships carry a
maximum of 12 people, and they tend to be very quiet
people.
I work my principal hours from about
10:30 at night until daybreak. The world is yours at
that point. Most all the passengers are asleep.
I had written from the birth of Kunta
Kinte through his capture. And I had got into the habit
of talking to the character. I knew Kunta. I knew
everything about Kunta. I knew what he was going to do.
What he had done. Everything. And so I would talk to
him. And I had become so attached to him that I knew now
I had to put him in the slave ship and bring him across
the ocean. That was the next part of the book. And I
just really couldn't quite bring myself to write that.
I was in San Francisco. I wrote about
40 pages and chunked it out. When you write well, it
isn't a question so much of what you want to say, it's a
question of feel. Does it feel like you want it to feel?
The feel starts coming in somewhere around about the
fourth rewrite.
I wrote, twice more, about 40 pages
and threw it out. And I realized what my bother was: I
couldn't bring myself to feel I was up to writing about
Kunta Kinte in that slave ship and me in a high-rise
apartment. I had to get closer to Kunta. I had run out
of my money at The Digest, lying so many times
about when I'd finish so I couldn't ask for any more. I
don't know where I got the money from. I went to Africa.
Put out the word I wanted to get a ship coming from
Africa to Florida. I just wanted to simulate the
crossing.
I went down to Liberia, and I got on
a freight ship called appropriately enough the
African Star. She was carrying a partial cargo of
raw rubber in bales. And I got on as a passenger. I
couldn't tell the captain or the mate what I wanted to
do because they couldn't allow me to do it.
But I found one hold that was just
about a third full of cargo and there was an entryway
into it with a metal ladder down to the bottom of the
hold. Down in there they had a long, wide, thick piece
of rough sawed timber. They called it dunnage.
It's used between cargo to keep it from shifting in
rough seas.
After dinner the first night, I made
my way down to this hold. I had a little pocket light. I
took off my clothing to my underwear and lay down on my
back on this piece of dunnage. I imagined I'm Kunta
Kinte. I lay there and I got cold and colder. Nothing
seemed to come except how ridiculous it was that I was
doing this. By morning I had a terrible cold. I went
back up. And the next night I'm there doing the same
thing.
Well, the third night when I left the
dinner table, I couldn't make myself go back down in
that hold. I just felt so miserable. I don't think I
ever felt quite so bad. And instead of going down in the
hold, I went to the stern of the ship. And I'm standing
up there with my hands on the rail and looking down
where the propellers are beating up this white froth.
And in the froth are little luminous green
phosphorescences. At sea you see that a lot. And I'm
standing there looking at it, and all of a sudden it
looked like all my troubles just came on me. I owed
everybody I knew. Everybody was on my case. Why don't
you finish this foolish thing? You ought not be doing it
in the first place, writing about black genealogy.
That's crazy.
I was just utterly miserable. Didn't
feel like I had a friend in the world. And then a
thought came to me that was startling. It wasn't
frightening. It was just startling. I thought to myself,
Hey, there's a cure for all this. You don't have to go
through all this mess. All I had to do was step through
the rail and drop in the sea.
Once having thought it, I began to
feel quite good about it. I guess I was half a second
before dropping in the sea. Fine, that would take care
of it. You won't owe anybody anything. To hell with the
publishers and the editors.
And I began to hear voices. They were
not strident. They were just conversational. And I
somehow knew every one of them. And they were saying
things like, No, don't do that. No, you're doing the
best you can. You just keep going.
And I knew exactly who they were.
They were Grandma, Chicken George, Kunta Kinte. They
were my cousin, Georgia, who lived in Kansas City and
had passed away. They were all these people whom I had
been writing about. They were talking to me. It was like
in a dream.
I remember fighting myself loose from
that rail, turning around, and I went scuttling like a
crab up over the hatch. And finally I made my way back
to my little stateroom and pitched down, head first,
face first, belly first on the bunk, and I cried dry. I
cried more I guess than I've cried since I was four
years old.
And it was about midnight when I kind
of got myself together. Then I got up, and the feeling
was you have been assessed and have been tried and
you've been approved by all them who went before. So go
ahead. And then I went back down in the hold. I had a
terrible head cold, fluish like. I had with me a long
yellow tablet and some pencils. This time I did not take
my clothing off like I'd been doing. I kept them on
because I was having such a bad cold. I lay down on the
piece of timber.
Now Kunta Kinte was lying in this
position on a shelf in the ship, the Lord Ligonier.
She had left the Gambia River, July 5, 1767. She sailed
two months, three weeks, two days. Destination
Annapolis, Maryland. And he was lying there. And others
were in there with him whom he knew. And what would he
think?
What would be some of the things they
would say? And when they would come to me in the dark, I
would write. And that was how I did every night, only
ten nights. From there to Florida. I remember rushing
through the big, big Miami Airport. Flew back to San
Francisco. Got with a doctor, and he kind of patched me
up.
I sat down with those long yellow
tablets and transcribed. And I began to write the
chapter in Roots where Kunta Kinte crossed the
ocean in a slave ship. That was probably the most
emotional experience I had in the whole thing.
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, you never saw clear air before. In
some latitudes, down off West Africa, South America, on
the night of a full moon, there are times 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 Gods 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, 35 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 of the ship cutting
through the resistance of the ocean. With all that going
on, feeling these many things and seeing the God things,
that's about as close to holy as you are going to ever
get.
Edited
from a talk at Reader’s Digest, October 10, 1991,
four months before Alex Haley’s death
Excerpted from the book
Alex Haley: The Man Who
Traced America’s Roots. Copyright ©
2007 The Reader's Digest Association, Inc. Published by
The Reader's Digest Association, Inc.; April 2007;
$17.95US; 978-0-7621-0885-5.
Alexander Murray Palmer Haley
(1921-1992) was an African American writer who was best
known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Roots.
A writer of distinction and a contributing editor for
Reader’s Digest, Haley's first major work was The
Autobiography of Malcolm X, published in 1965. Growing up, Haley had heard stories
about his African ancestor, Kunta Kinte, and became
interested in tracing his family to its deepest roots.
It was Lila Acheson Wallace, cofounder of The Digest,
who commissioned Haley to do the research that would
create a groundbreaking article in the magazine. When
Reader's Digest published the first excerpts from
Roots in our May and June 1974 issues, we said it
was an epic work, "destined to become a classic of
American literature." That has proved to be an
understatement.
In just five months after the book
hit stores in 1976, more than one million hardcover
copies were purchased. Since then, Roots has
taken its place among the greatest bestsellers of all
time as the number of copies has grown to over six
million worldwide. Its impact on television was also
historic: Some 130 million Americans watched at least
part of the 12-hour drama, making it the highest-rated
miniseries ever. Roots changed the way we think
about race in this country and profoundly affected the
lives of many people, especially African Americans.
For more information, please visit
www.rd.com/returnToRoots.do.
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Roots the 12-hour TV series in 1977,
based on Alex Haley’s Pulitzer-prize winning ancestral epic Roots,
garnered 80 to130 million viewers. The Emmy-winning miniseries,
the most-watched of all time, was the first television program
to bring the horrors of slavery to life.
Roots
cast of 45 members included
John Amos, LeVar Burton, Lynne Moody; Richard Roundtree, Doug
McClure, Lou Gossett, Jr., Lynda Day George, Ben Vereen, George
Stanford Brown, Lloyd Bridges. MacDonald Carey, Burl Ives, Lorne
Greene, Leslie Uggams, Madge Sinclair, Chuck Connors,
Lawrence
Hilton-Jacobs, Thalmus Rasulala, Vic Morrow, O.J. Simpson,
and Ed Asner.
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 |
Super Rich: A Guide to Having it All
By Russell Simmons
Russell Simmons knows firsthand that
wealth is rooted in much more than the
stock
market. True wealth has more to do with
what's in your heart than what's in your
wallet. Using this knowledge, Simmons
became one of America's shrewdest
entrepreneurs, achieving a level of
success that most investors only dream
about. No matter how much material gain
he accumulated, he never stopped lending
a hand to those less fortunate. In
Super Rich, Simmons uses his rare
blend of spiritual savvy and
street-smart wisdom to offer a new
definition of wealth-and share timeless
principles for developing an unshakable
sense of self that can weather any
financial storm. As Simmons says, "Happy
can make you money, but money can't make
you happy." |
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
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George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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