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<text>
<title>
(1970s) Haley's RX: Talk, Write, Reunite
</title>
<history>TIME-The Weekly Magazine-1970s Highlights</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
TIME Magazine
February 14, 1977
Haley's RX: Talk, Write, Reunite
</hdr>
<body>
<p> "If I had been taking hashish, I could not have dreamed of
this." In the fashionable Los Angeles community of Cheviot
Hills, every mail brings bulging sacks of letters to Alex Haley--all of it evidence of the astonishing impact produced by his
saga of a black family's tortuous trail to freedom. Haley thinks
he knows why Roots touched all America. In an interview last
week with TIME Correspondent William Marmon, he explained his
own theory of the Roots phenomenon and told how he came to write
the book.
</p>
<p> "In this country," says Alex Haley, "we are young, brash
and technologically oriented. We are all trying to build
machines so that we can push a button and get things done a
millisecond faster. But as a consequence, we are drawing away
from one of the most priceless things we have--where we came
from and how we got to where we are. The young are drawing away
from older people."
</p>
<p> Haley quickly grants that television can be "a positive
social influence"--how could he not?--but then goes on to
castigate the tube for widening the generation gap. "TV has
contributed to killing off the old form of entertainment where
the family sat around listening to older people. TV has
alienated youth from its elders, and this has cost us culturally
and socially."
</p>
<p> So has the trend toward divided family units that isolate
the aged, he says. "Just look at the scores of thousands of
housing tracts in this country, where only parents and children
live. Think of the impact on these children who will grow up
without close proximity to grandparents. There are certain
things that a grandmammy or a granddaddy can do for a child that
no one else can. It's sort of like stardust--the relationship
between grandparents and children. The lack of this for any
children has to have a negative effect on society. The edges of
these children are a little sharper for the lack of it." The
universal appeal of Roots, he concluded, is based on the average
American's longing for a sense of heritage.
</p>
<p> Magic Bond. Haley even goes so far as to advocate an
antidote to this trend toward rootlessness. Young people can
"revolutionize" their own role within their families, he says,
and he offers them a three-point prescription. "I tell young
people to go to the oldest members of their family and get as
much oral history as possible. Many grandparents carry three or
four generations of history in their heads but don't talk about
it because they have been ignored. And when the young person
starts doing this, the old are warmed to the cockles of their
souls and will tell a grandchild everything they can muster."
</p>
<p> Then, Haley says, the history of the family should be
written and a copy sent to every member. Haley encourages youths
to rummage through attics, basements and closets for
illuminating family letters and other memorabilia. "It's a
simple thing," says Haley. "But the existence of a written
history gives the family something it never had before. There
is an almost miraculous effect once it exists." Finally, Haley
urges, "have family reunions. There is something magic about the
common sense of a blood bond. It's not less magic for black,
white, brown or polka dot. The reunion gives a sense that the
family cares about itself and is proud of itself. And there is
the assumption that you, the family member, are obligated to
reflect this pride, and, if possible, add to it."
</p>
<p> Writing Cook. Because Roots is a black family reunion of
sorts, Haley sees some distinct differences in why whites and
blacks are so attracted by it. Discounting speculation that his
work would unleash a black rage, Haley says, "I've not heard one
murmur of radicalization from blacks. I have heard ebullience
and happiness that the story has been told. The blacks who are
buying books are not buying them to go out and fight someone,
but because they want to know who they are. Roots is all of
our stories. It's the same for me or any black. It's just a
matter of filling in the blanks--which person, living in which
village, going on what ship, across the same ocean, slavery,
emancipation, the struggle for freedom." Now, Haley says, "some
very important things are happening among young blacks. The
generation of the 1960s was so quick to label all older blacks
as `Uncle Toms.' Roots has helped to turn this around. People
come up and thank me for making them go back to their parents
and elders. And I tell young people to go home and hug their
grandma and grandpap.
</p>
<p> "The white response is more complicated. But when you start
talking about family, about lineage and ancestry, you are
talking about every person on earth. We all have it, it's a
great equalizer. White people come up to me and tell me that
Roots has started them thinking about their own families and
where they came from. I think the book has touched a strong,
subliminal pulse."
</p>
<p> The origin of Roots is the very kind of storytelling Haley
lauds. While a boy in Henning, Tenn. he first learned of the
"furthest-back person" his grandmother talked about--Kunta
Kinte. Says Haley: "Grandmother would bubble with pride about
`Chicken George' [Haley's great-great-grandfather], but when
telling about Kunta Kinte her voice would fill with awe, like
she was talking about a Bible story." Haley's college-educated
parents were teachers, his mother in the local elementary school
and his father at black colleges in the South. Haley took books
out of libraries "like lollipops" but found no such sweetness
in school. Graduating with a C average from high school at the
age of 15, he attended college for two years and then in 1939
enlisted in the Coast Guard.
</p>
<p> As a matter of course, he was shunted into the steward's
department. Recounts Haley: "I was on an ammunition ship in the
southwest Pacific, and the big problem was boredom and
loneliness. I had never thought of being a writer, but I wrote
lots and lots of letters. And crew members began to come to me
for help in writing love letters. I got pretty good at this, and
before long it kinda got to be I didn't have to cook any more.
I just wrote love letters." While copying passages from a book
(he cannot remember which one), "I felt for the first time what
good professional writing feels like. I got the yen to see if
I couldn't do the same thing."
</p>
<p> Haley collected hundreds of rejection slips before he
finally sold his first piece to This Week, a syndicated Sunday
supplement. Before long he was known as "the cook who writes,"
and by the time he retired from the Coast Guard in 1959 at the
age of 37, he had attained the rank of chief journalist. Though
he had served for 20 years, he received no pension checks--those went to one of his two former wives.
</p>
<p> Hanging In. Haley moved into a basement apartment in New
York City's Greenwich Village and tried to support himself as
a freelance writer. "Everyone I knew was saying `Writing is
nice, but why don't you get a job?' I owed everyone. One day a
friend called with a civil service job that paid $6,000 a year.
I turned it down. I wanted to make it writing. My friend banged
the phone down. I owed him too. I took psychic inventory. I
looked in the cupboard, and there were two cans of sardines,
marked two for 21 cents. I had eighteen cents in my pocket.
That's all I had in the world. There was nowhere to go but up.
I put the two cans of sardines and the eighteen cents in a sack
and said to myself that I'd keep them there. And the next day
I got a check for a piece I'd written." Today the coins and cans
are mounted in a collage that hangs in Haley's library--an
artful reminder of how it feels "hanging in there when you don't
know what would happen."
</p>
<p> Haley began getting regular assignments from the Reader's
Digest and later Playboy, where he inadvertently created that
magazine's monthly interview format while doing a piece on Jazz
Trumpeter Miles Davis. Another of his subjects was Black Muslim
Leader Malcolm X, which led to his first book. Published in
1965, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, became a 6-million-copy
bestseller.
</p>
<p> Two weeks after finishing the Malcolm X manuscript, Haley
wandered into the National Archives Building in Washington. The
family history, told and retold by his grandma, still intrigued
him. "The Kinte story, which had been passed down by many
generations of slaves, was not elaborate. It was really very
simple. But it was the story around which whole generations
coalesced. It kept us together. It made us proud of who we were
and from where we had come." Haley asked a clerk in the
microfilm room for the 1870 records of Alamance County, N.C.,
where his forebears had lived. As he recalls the day, "It had
become sort of a mystical experience, turning those reels of
film." But after a couple of eyestraining hours, he got up to
leave. "As I walked out through the genealogical reading room,
I noticed sort of peripherally that unlike the usual library
scene where people are lolling around, here the people were
intently bent over the books and tables. The thought popped into
my head that these people were trying to find out who they were.
I turned around and went back into the microfilm room."
</p>
<p> About an hour later, Haley discovered what he wanted.
"Suddenly I found myself looking down: `Tom Murray. Occupation--blacksmith,' and beneath him, `Irene, M--for Mulatto,' and
their children. The youngest was Elizabeth, age six. And that
really grabbed me. That was Aunt Liz. I used to sit on her front
porch and play with her long grey hair. The experience
galvanized me. Grandma's words became real. It wasn't that I had
not believed her. You just didn't not believe Grandma. But there
was something about the fact that what Grandma had been talking
about was right there in U.S. Government records in the National
Archives, along with the Bill of Rights, the Constitution and
everything else."
</p>
<p> Haley's twelve years of research and writing on Roots had
begun. In retrospect, Haley firmly believes it was more than his
own perseverance that got the book finished. "However that
sounds," he says, "it was one of those things that God in his
infinite wisdom and in his time and way decided should happen.
I feel I'm a conduit through which this is happening. It was
just something that was meant to be. I say this because there
were so many things that had to happen over which I had no
control. And if any one thing hadn't happened, then this could
not have come together."
</p>
<p> Success Model. Just as he forthrightly ponders the
possibility of divine guidance, Haley is unabashedly thrilled
with the riches that Roots has brought him. "It really startles
me that the last thing I think of now is money." Though he plans
only to buy a new stereo, a TV and a video-tape machine (to
watch reruns of the series, among other things), Haley says,
"The success in money terms is beyond imagination."
</p>
<p> There is another reward too that pleases Haley; black
children see him as a model for success. One stiff-braided
little girl, brought with her class to meet Haley at a Los
Angeles bookstore, said matter of factly, "I'm going to write
a bigger book than you." Replied Haley, "Come on, honey, and do
it."
</p>
</body>
</article>
</text>