Alex Haley (21 page)

Massaquo reported “the steep escalation of attention which women of all races and ages” were paying Haley. “Deluged with kisses, hugs, love letters, marriage proposals and plain invitations to ‘get it on,'” Haley demurred, saying he was too busy to take up any of the offers. He asked if Haley planned to marry again. “Marriage is the best state for a person,” Haley answered, glancing toward My Lewis, his editorial assistant and “close companion for three years.” He had already found his prospective third wife in Lewis, whom he called “the most comprehensively compatible woman I have ever known.” Haley and Lewis were married later in 1977.
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Haley had reached the height of the celebrity for which he had longed. He had expected that the benefits of big success would be freedom from money worries and the liberty to travel as he desired. From his many interviews with famous people, he knew something of the perils of celebrity, but writing about fame and coping with it were two separate matters. Two years later Haley would tell the readers of
Playboy,
“There are days when I wish it hadn't happened.” Perhaps explaining what had happened, he said, would “serve as a reminder that our great god ‘success,' with its omnipotent trinity of fame, wealth, and power, is something we should learn to
respect
rather than to worship—lest it enslave us.” Haley was still rushing around the country when the most troubling of all celebrity problems suddenly appeared, almost all at once, in April 1977.
27

10

Roots Uncovered

Haley enjoyed the heights of celebrity for only a short while. In the spring of 1977, he faced conflicts with his publisher, journalists determined to expose his mistakes in
Roots,
and two authors who alleged that he had copied parts of
Roots
from their work. For the next two years, he would spend much of his time defending himself in both the court of public opinion and the federal courts of the Southern District of New York. At the end of 1978, Haley felt that he had been maligned and persecuted for being a successful black writer. To a large extent, that was true, but he had also caused his own undoing in some important ways.

In March 1977 Haley sued Doubleday for $5 million in California state court, alleging that the publisher had failed to sell the book properly and asking that the paperback contract be renegotiated. The complaint argued that Doubleday had not provided book distributors with sufficient copies of
Roots
to satisfy the clearly foreseeable public demand. As a result, copies were not available for sale in Los Angeles and other metropolitan areas during and after the television program ran. Another part of the complaint contended that Doubleday's premature announcement that Dell, which it now owned, would soon produce a paperback had undermined hardback sales and reduced Haley's royalties. There was a lot of money at stake. Haley got $1.87 for each hardback sold but only about fifteen cents for a Dell mass-market paperback, priced at $2.95. It was not clear whether Dell would publish a paperback sooner than a year after the hardback release, the traditional timing for paperback publication.
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Haley had held a grudge against Doubleday since at least 1967, when, during his worst financial struggles, he had become resentful of the publisher's unwillingness to raise his advance. “My quarrel is not with my friends on the editorial side of Doubleday,” he said at the time of the lawsuit. “My quarrel is with the corporate Doubleday.” In the lawsuit, he was “speaking symbolically for two groups—black people and others struggling to make it in the country, and writers, who are like sharecroppers.” Then after casting his complaint in this racial context, he said, “I hasten to add that there is nothing racial involved in the case.” But he wrote privately that he had heard “within the trade” that Nelson Doubleday was “anti–black folk.” Suspicions about the owner were understandable, given the publisher's sudden cancellation of
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
in 1965. Haley considered it indicative of a “hardrock corporate perspective” to hold him to the “time-of-hunger” contract he had originally made for “Before This Anger.” He thought Nelson Doubleday was “dealing with me now as when I was desperate during the years I was working on the book.” Now he had produced “the most talked-about book in the country,” and the biggest-selling book in Doubleday's history, one that added “luster to the Doubleday corporate name.” He thought he should be treated differently.
2

A Doubleday corporate spokesman expressed dismay about the accusation of mismanagement. The book had been number one on the best-seller list for several months, and it had sold more than 1.5 million copies in 175 days, facts that drove the man to observe drily, “We must have done something right.” The publisher pointed out that, over the course of the twelve years of Haley's writing, it had increased his advance from $5,000 to $96,000. The book had been a success “in large measure as a result of the editorial assistance rendered by Doubleday” and the publisher's promotion efforts.
3

The lawsuit, filed by Lou Blau, was a strategic measure to elicit a better paperback deal. In the world of Hollywood, lawsuits were often filed as negotiating tactics. Blau and Haley had good reason to want a different arrangement for the paperback editions. Paperback rights had been sold to Dell in 1967 for $18,000, of which Haley got half. It was now worth far more than that. The 50-50 split was normal at that time, but by 1977 the split on big-selling paperbacks was often 60-40 or even 75-25 in the author's favor. “Mr. Doubleday is electing to hold me glued fast to what, by a comparison, in virtually
everyone
else's opinion, is an obviously ridiculous, ludicrous paperback deal,” Haley said. The Doubleday takeover of Dell meant that its interests were no longer identical to the author's, as would have been the case had the hardcover publisher dealt with an outside paperback publisher. To complicate matters, Haley was contracted with Doubleday for his next book, “My Search for Roots.” Haley told his agent that, as the author of two books now being called “classics,” he would have to consider “enticement” offers if Doubleday refused to rewrite the original contract.
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It is not clear exactly what the lawsuit yielded. Dell kept the paperback rights and sold millions, and they may well have given Haley a larger royalty. Doubleday kept the contract for “My Search for Roots,” but the book never appeared. In August 1977 Haley quietly withdrew the suit. He told the
New York Times
that he regretted the legal action. He had sued, he said, on the advice of attorneys in the film industry, where people “sue each other and then have lunch,” but he found that business was not done that way in the publishing world. “It was my naiveté. I felt terrible.” He was, after all, a person who did not like interpersonal conflict, and by then, he was mired in plenty of conflict coming from other directions.
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* * *

On April 10, 1977, Mark Ottaway, a travel writer for the
Sunday Times
of London, wrote in an article entitled “Roots Uncovered” that the United States was “in the grip of ‘Rootsmania.'”
Roots
had been presented as fact, and that “above all else accounts for the book's phenomenal success.” But Ottaway, who had gone to the Gambia to write about tourism, claimed to have happened on information that exposed Haley's research as fraudulent. He wrote that Kebbe Fofana was a man of “notorious unreliability.” Residents of Juffure were involved with the slave trade not as victims but as collaborators. Ottaway claimed that Haley's Gambian advisers had not found an informant in Baddibu, further to the east in Gambia, but when they looked in the ancient Kingdom of Barra at Juffure, they found someone who would tell Haley's family story. Ottaway had discovered what Bakary Sidibe, the Gambian archivist, had told Haley in 1973, that by birth Fofana was not a griot but an imam, and in reality something of a playboy: “His young days were spent more in sowing wild oats than in studying.” Ottaway wrote that in Juffure, “No villagers can remember the name of any ancestor captured by slavers. Except, miraculously, that of Kunta Kinte.” Several Juffure people told Ottaway that on the day in 1967 when Haley visited, everyone there knew he was coming and why. Ottaway questioned whether the “year the King's soldiers came” was in 1767, because many soldiers sent by British, French, and Portuguese kings had been coming for a hundred years before then, and some came years afterward. The British were allowed to trade in Juffure “only under one condition: that no subjects of the King of Barra should ever be captured as slaves.” Ottaway doubted that the person Haley said was taken to America in 1767 was in fact Kunta Kinte. But Haley chose 1767 on the basis of his American research, not on evidence from the Gambia.
6

When Ottaway put the factual problems before Haley on the day before the article ran, Haley conceded that there were probably mistakes in the book, but he said he had been “misled during his researches in Gambia.” Haley told the reporter that everyone in the Gambia “casts doubts on everyone else and in the end he had to believe someone. So he [chose] to believe Fofana.” But Haley admitted that the mischaracterization of Juffure was a conscious decision. “You must understand, this book is also symbolic. I know Juffure was a British trading post and my portrait of the village bears no resemblance to the way it was. But the portrait I gave was true of nearly all the other villages in Gambia.” Blacks, he said, “need a place called Eden. . . . I wanted to portray our original color in its pristine state, and I know it is a fair portrayal.”
7

Based on a week of research in the Gambia, Ottaway was certain that Haley's story was wrong. “The probabilities that [Kunta Kinte] disappeared much later than 1767, that he was never shipped as a slave to America, and that he was not an ancestor of Haley far outweigh any possibilities that he did or was.” If it happened at all, Kunta Kinte's disappearance was more likely to have taken place in 1829, when the village more nearly fit Haley's description.
8

Ottaway's alleged exposure of
Roots
hardly amounted to evidence that undermined the whole story of Haley's ancestral origins in the Gambia. Haley probably had imposed his idea about chronology on those aiding him in Bathurst, but the family story provided plausible leads that at some point in the past an African of the Kinte clan had been taken into slavery and ended up in Virginia. But by insisting on such a specific account, Haley had opened himself to condemnation if even some of that account was not literally true. Newspaper reporters typically strived for a standard of pure objective truth, as did most academics. To such critics, a few mistakes of fact damned the whole work. But Haley was trying to counter the West's image of Africa as being uncivilized and without culture or morality. Still, even academic critics sympathetic to Haley thought it was a mistake to depict the village inaccurately.
9

Haley insisted that he had made no errors knowingly, but he did not acknowledge that he had received Sidibe's warning about Fofana more than two years before
Roots
was published. He told Ottaway he had been tempted to call the African part of the book an historical novel, “but in the end I felt I could only write what I was told.” No one knew exactly what happened, but he stood by
Roots
“as a symbol of the fate of my people.”

Ottaway's story was big international news. On April 10 Haley was on his way to London when the
New York Times
asked him to comment. He fought back immediately. “People are seeking now to explode ‘Roots.' . . . It would be a scoop to beat all hell if ‘Roots' could be proved to be a hoax, and that's one of the reasons why it was so important to me to document as best I could.”
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By the time he got to London, Haley's indignation had turned to feelings of persecution. He told the
Times
of London that he had spent twelve years on his research, and he resented any opportunist “spending seven days in Africa and then writing a story which seeks to blemish the deepest, strictest, most honest research I could do, given the materials I had to work with.” Haley said what mattered was that Ottaway had put on
Roots
“a mark of doubt” and that “people won't remember what the specifics are, but they'll remember that it has been questioned.” He had just been interviewed on radio by someone not familiar with the substance of Ottaway's criticism but who “just knew it raised questions.”
11

By the end of that week, Haley had returned to Juffure with fifty American visitors, including his brothers, Lou Blau, and a large contingent of photographers, some of them there to gather film footage for the next miniseries,
Roots: The Next Generations.
In Juffure the villagers had never seen television, which was not yet available in the Gambia. The Ottaway story had followed the visitors. “Mr. Haley's visit comes at a time of mounting controversy over his phenomenally popular best seller,” reported the
New York Times
's Africa correspondent. The
Times
of London story had “angered and dampened the spirit” of the Haley party and encouraged journalistic skepticism. “At times, the commercial aspects of the trip seemed to overshadow all others, as some 38 members of the Kinte clan were assembled around the author, who was handed a baby to bounce on his knee for the benefit of the movie camera.” A television director asked Haley several times to explain what Juffure meant to him in order to film Haley's response from different angles. “Juffure is not the paradise that the village portrayed on television is,” the
Times
reporter concluded. “Back on the yacht, [Haley] discussed the visit with his brothers. ‘A helluva welcoming. You couldn't stage that if you wanted to.'”
12

The more doubtful his critics were, the more adamant Haley became that
Roots
was factual. At the end of his Gambian visit, Haley expressed anger that Ottaway was “headline grabbing” and that he had “deliberately distorted and slanted” what Haley had said. “But what really upset me most was that, also, by implication, it clearly sought to impugn the dignity of black Americans' heritage.” Could not blacks have “one case where we are able to go back to our past without someone taking a cheap shot to torpedo it?” He told a reporter for
People
magazine: “When you consider how many blacks were taken out of here, it seems like the Good Lord would let one of us trace his family tree back to his ancestors. It just incenses me that if one
was
able to do it—after nine
years
of research—some s.o.b. would come here and question it.”
13

Haley still had plenty of admirers. During the week after the Ottaway article appeared, ABC television brought a group of Gambians to appear on its
Good Morning America
show to defend Haley. On April 11 the National Book Award Committee gave him a special award: “Because Alex Haley's ‘Roots' does not accommodate itself to the category of history, but transcends that and other categories, members of the history panel were unable to name it as one of the nominees in history. They are at one, however, that its distinguished literary quality justifies according it a special citation of merit.”
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