Alex Haley (26 page)

In 1994 four cultural anthropologists wrote in an academic journal that “Afrocentricity could not have existed without
Roots.
” Afrocentrists believed and taught that European civilization was derived from African origins—an understanding of history that Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam had advanced. Afrocentrist history was often condemned as ahistorical, and it caused a furor on some American college campuses in the 1980s. Afrocentric history was not what Alex Haley had presented in
Roots,
but he paved the way for men like his friend Leonard Jeffries, who did teach it. Afrocentrists were “preaching to the already converted,” the anthropologists said, because
Roots
had already taught black Americans they had “their own stories of origin and identity.” Haley and Malcolm X “wanted to use Africa in this crucial manner in order to shield the American Black against the ego deficiency produced by White racism.”
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Many Americans thought Haley and Malcolm had succeeded.

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Haley did little writing in the early 1980s. “Even as the
Roots
madness died down, I continued to do too much speaking and not enough writing,” he recalled. “Because I don't like to turn people down—it bothers me to hurt anyone's feelings.” Lecturing was easy and lucrative—he was now paid $10,000 per lecture—and it gave him good reason to indulge his wanderlust, although he said he did not keep up the frenetic speaking pace of the late 1960s and early 1970s. By the late 1980s his income from royalties had declined to the point that he needed to lecture to maintain a high standard of living. Haley continued to make freighter trips in the 1980s, ostensibly to write. He usually sailed for four to six weeks at a time, often over the Christmas holidays. He sailed along the Pacific side of Latin America in 1984 and from Savannah to Rotterdam the following year. In 1988 he went to Australia, taking along a friend, Tennessee former governor Lamar Alexander. At some point Haley leased an apartment in Seattle. It is not clear what the attraction was there, but he visited the city regularly.
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What writing he produced usually followed a familiar pattern—it was autobiographical and meant to end up on television. The one story that was not autobiographical was about a mountain man and his son, called “Appalachian.” In 1985
Reader's Digest
published “Easter in Henning,” an excerpt from Haley's forthcoming book, “Henning, U.S.A.,” which in fact never appeared. He also discussed a project called “Queen,” about his paternal grandmother, which would, as he said, “square another debt” to his father; Simon Haley had hinted for years that the story of his side of the family, particularly his mother, Queen, would make a good book. Queen had cared for Alex and his brothers for a time after the boys' mother had died. He had heard many stories about her and her white father, Colonel Jackson.
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In 1986 Haley decided to return to his roots in Tennessee. He had lived in California, mostly in Los Angeles, since the early 1970s, and with Haley now at age sixty-five, the move represented a large shift in lifestyle. He and his brothers had reacquired the family home in Henning, which they had sold after Aunt Liz died. The property had fallen into disrepair and been damaged by a fire, but now they renovated it and, thanks to Alex's fame, had it named a state historic landmark. The Haley brothers planned to turn the house into a tourist site. Alex Haley was drawn home for Tennessee Homecoming '86, a yearlong celebration that promoted tourism by urging those who had left Tennessee to discover the progress that the state had made in their absence—and spend money they had earned elsewhere. The celebration hearkened back to the tradition at southern evangelical churches of setting aside one Sunday in the month when former members returned to visit old friends. It also reflected the lasting impact of
Roots
on American culture: many people had been prompted to reconnect with their past through “roots travel,” and the growing phenomenon, especially among blacks, of both family and community reunions. People who had migrated to the North traveled in big groups to the towns or rural communities where they had been born. They often wore t-shirts announcing such events as “The Haley Family Reunion” or “The Henning, Tennessee Reunion.” The phenomenon continues to this day.

Tennessee Homecoming '86 also formed committees to do research on local history in preparation for the state's bicentennial, in 1996. The national bicentennial of 1976 had put Americans in the mind of celebrating two-hundredth anniversaries. Tennessee Homecoming was the idea of Governor Lamar Alexander, a young, progressive-minded Republican. In Tennessee politics of the mid-1980s, Alexander projected a modern approach to government, a break with the old one-party Democratic control of the segregationist South. He supported education and opposed racial divisiveness. Alexander accomplished the shift in political perception so successfully that he became popular enough for Tennesseeans typically to refer to him simply as “Lamar,” a familiarity he encouraged by habitually donning a checkered flannel shirt, almost regardless of occasion. What better way was there to demonstrate a “new Tennessee” than to engage its newest celebrity, a genial black writer, in celebration of the old Tennessee? Alexander and Haley were already acquainted, and the young governor liked the writer's positive attitude, especially his oft-repeated slogan, “Find the good and praise it.” Alexander drew him into the project, making him the honorary co-chair of the celebration, along with the country-music comedian Minnie Pearl. Haley and Alexander traveled across the state on a train during Tennessee Homecoming.

In the fall of 1986, Haley bought two condominiums in Knoxville, home of the University of Tennessee and the Tennessee Valley Authority, in the Appalachian Mountains area of eastern Tennessee. In his 1946 book
Inside U.S.A.,
the writer John Gunther had called Knoxville the ugliest city in the United States, but it was undergoing a renaissance of late, having a hosted a well-attended World's Fair in 1982. In Knoxville Haley created a circle of friends composed mainly of prominent white men, most of them local celebrities. They included John Rice Irwin, a school superintendent and folklorist who had founded the Museum of Appalachia and thus could help Haley with his miniseries, “Appalachian”; Alexander, who in 1988 became president of the University of Tennessee; the Harvard professor Richard Marius, formerly of the University of Tennessee faculty, who ran a writing program for high school students in Knoxville each summer; Jim Clayton, an industrialist; and David White, a media entrepreneur. Edye Ellis, a black television newscaster, was the notable exception to the white, male character of Haley's crowd. “I don't go to parties,” Haley told the
New York Times
in 1988. “I live very well with myself.” Perhaps so, but he was known to
give
big parties in Knoxville, especially after he bought a mansion on Cherokee Boulevard, Knoxville's most prestigious address.

He also hosted parties at a 130-acre farm he bought from Irwin, next door to the Museum of Appalachia. There, he renovated an old farmhouse and built several buildings to accommodate visitors. He created a two-acre lake with a dock leading to a gazebo at its center. He hired a decorator specializing in African American–themed art, but when she hung an image of a black fist, he fired her and put up his Hollywood memorabilia and scenes from Appalachia.
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In the next few years, he entertained his publishing friends from New York, among them Lisa Drew, and his television friends from Hollywood, including Lou Blau.

Haley was a good citizen of Knoxville, a constant promoter of the joys of Tennessee life. He accepted many invitations to speak for free. Once he spoke to a student honor society that as a service project sponsored the local home for unwed mothers, and afterward he posed for pictures with a dozen pregnant teenagers. He agreed to teach a course at the University of Tennessee, and the university administrators asked the English department to name him an adjunct professor. But the English professors, often struggling with plagiarism by students, thought he might have already set a bad example. The journalism department did take him on, but his service did not last long because he often failed to make it to class, and his unreliability was reported in the student newspaper.
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* * *

Haley had attracted a biographer who learned perhaps more than anyone else about the inner life of the writer. Anne Romaine was a pretty and extroverted forty-three-year-old North Carolina native who had studied history in graduate school at the University of Virginia in the mid-1960s. While there, she turned to civil rights activism in the Southern Student Organizing Committee, which led to her create the Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project, a racially mixed troupe of traditional singers and musicians who toured the South performing protest songs. She also wrote, produced, and recorded folk music. She and her activist husband, Howard Romaine, lived in Nashville in the mid-1970s, and there she worked as a curator for the Tennessee State Museum, becoming involved in the naming of the Haley home in Henning as a state landmark. She met Haley in 1986, and they agreed that she would write his biography. By the time she was seriously at work on it, in the mid-1980s, she and Howard Romaine were divorced.

Anne Romaine did a massive amount of work collecting documents and conducting interviews, but her research was not a comprehensive quest for sources, and her interviews were not systematic inquiries and usually were poorly transcribed. Eventually she got access to Haley's personal papers, which might have yielded a good biography. But she died suddenly of a burst appendix in 1995, before she could write much of her book. Her papers, containing her research on Haley, were deposited at the University of Tennessee archives. Romaine's curiosity about Haley was intensely personal, and her findings revealed his personal side in a way that his almost continuous autobiographical writing and talking never had.

Romaine spent a lot of time with Haley, although not as much as she wanted. She said he found “one obstacle after another” to delay the biography. But they were, she later said, “close friends for six years.” He told her of his first sexual encounter and recounted the two times in life he had had angry confrontations. She knew his tastes in music and appears not to have approved of his affinity for Mel Torme, Billie Holiday, Billy Eckstine, and Arthur Prysock. She witnessed his friendships in Knoxville with rich, Republican men, of which, again, she did not approve. She witnessed his “status as a folk hero.” She noted that once, in Nashville, a black woman stopped him on the street and castigated him for wearing polyester pants: “A man of your stature who represents success for those of us who are black should dress like he is
somebody
—not like some ordinary, old-timey man.” Haley asked Romaine what was wrong with polyester pants, and she explained that natural fibers were more stylish. He now understood, but the problem was, “I just ordered seven more pairs from the Sears catalog. I got them in every color. . . . They come already hemmed to my length.”
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Romaine freely speculated about Haley's psyche. She agreed with Nan Haley that “Alex is a master at not showing his feelings.” He did not appreciate Simon Haley's “outgoing, free wheeling” manner, much preferring his grandfather, Will Palmer, “the strong silent type.” Romaine asked about Haley's marital woes just as he was getting divorced from My Lewis. He was “too intensely private in his marriages,” he admitted to Romaine. She interviewed Haley's daughter Lydia Anne, his first child and Romaine's exact contemporary. Lydia Anne Haley was “a reformer and spiritualist,” but Romaine thought she was an embarrassment to her father, going against his view of “what a woman ought to be,” quiet and demure like the three he had married. Lydia Anne Haley was a “flashy and brassy” woman who helped people “understand why they are here.”

Romaine recounted spending late nights interviewing Haley at his Knoxville homes, just the two of them, with the writer lying on a sofa. Then in a private note, she wrote, “He told me he had been in love with me for a long time[,] since we first met in 1986.” She does not say they became lovers, nor does she deny it. She sensed his insecurities: “I am a Greek chorus to Alex. ‘Here are the things I admire about you. You are wonderful.'”

Romaine's curiosity about Haley's inner self led her to pose personal questions to the dozens of people she interviewed. She discovered that “he surrounds his outer professional life with white women and men and his close circle with black men and women.” She got intimate details of Haley's first marriage from Nan. She elicited from William “Fella” Haley his bitterness about Alex's neglect of him, which was less surprising than William and Nan's belief that Alex and Nan were never legally divorced. While Romaine was interviewing Alex's half-sister, Doris, his stepmother, Zeona, suddenly appeared, and Romaine captured Zeona denouncing Alex as a lout—and confirming the shrewish character that some saw in her but that Alex would not comment on. She learned of Leonard Jeffries's pain over Haley's failure to acknowledge his contributions toward advancing black genealogy. She listened as David Wolper, who adored Haley, expressed his bafflement at Haley's contradictions. Wolper told Romaine he wanted her to find out why Alex, “the ultimate symbol of the family,” could not “keep a family together. . . . Why is he such a wanderer, and why he didn't write any more than he's done, why he can't meet deadlines. . . . Why you go in his houses and he has not one picture of his children, no picture of his wife, there's no picture of his mother and father.” Those were good questions, but even the ever-personal, ever-penetrating Anne Romaine never got the answers.