I grew up believing an untruth, and it was all my grandmother’s fault.
Not my mother’s mother, who’d raised six boys (Julius, Oscar, Charlie, Louie, Dan, and Bob), one girl (Mum), and one extremely spoiled princess (Betty). Oh no. That grandmother lived until I was ten, and even as an elderly woman she was the dictionary definition of “formidable.” She’d been the driving force behind the entire family long before my grandfather had been crippled by arthritis and a taste for bootleg beer, and she was still climbing onto sewing machine tables to change light bulbs, slamming back Peruna when she felt poorly, and bossing the fruit of her loins well into her seventies. I can’t say I remember her all that well, but remember her I do, particularly after a second cousin told me a few years back that I looked a bit like her.
No, the grandmother who inadvertently lied to me, my parents, and pretty much everyone else was my father’s mother. She hasn’t appeared in these diaries before because I only saw her once or twice before her death in the early 1960’s. The only thing I recall about her is that she lived in a smallish house somewhere north of Pittsburgh, that she was partial to chintz and dark wood furniture, and that she had a couple of scatter rugs in her foyer. I’m not sure I saw a picture of her until I was an adult, and most of what I know about her came from my mother, who hadn’t known her well.
I’m not even certain of her first name; family records refer to her variously as “Harriet,” “Hettie,” “Nettie,” or “Anetta,” which is, to put it mildly, confusing. I do know that she was in her 30’s when she married my grandfather, and pushing forty when she gave birth to Dad in 1923. Her age is almost certainly why Dad was an only child, and why she looks more like his grandmother than his mother in family photographs.
Dad and his mother. Note the "spinning wheel" in the background....
The somewhat stern expression on her face is probably at least partially thanks to being rather older than the average mother of a young child in the 1930's. She looks even sterner (and older) in pictures taken after Dad was drafted in 1943, not that I blame her; my grandfather had died of pneumonia that winter, and she had no way of knowing if the brand new blue star in her window would be replaced by a gold one before the war was over.
Fortunately for her (and me), Dad came home safe and sound in the fall of 1945. His next few years were busy with college, graduate school, work, and taking pretty young colleagues to dates at gay bars jazz clubs, but he remained close enough to his mother that her wedding present to him and his bride was the neat little house in Edgewood that my grandfather had bought new thirty years earlier. My parents fixed it up and lived there for the next three or four years, and of course they visited Dad’s mother whenever they could.
It must have been on one of those visits that my grandmother told her daughter-in-law the lie that Mum told me, and that I believed until I was well into my teens. As I said above, I don’t believe it was a deliberate falsehood, not at all. By all accounts my grandmother was not given to making things up, and she probably thought she was sharing a precious bit of family lore that the future mother of her grandchild should be able to pass along in her turn. She wasn’t a genealogy buff like her cousin-in-law Kate Evans Tharp, and absent those skills she was all but certainly just repeating what she’d been told.
The lie was simple, and patriotic, and even plausible. Mum thought it was true, and Dad thought it was true, and so did I until I actually decided to see for myself whether my grandmother was descended from the first signer of the Declaration of Independence.
That’s right. My grandmother, whose maiden name was “Hancock,” was convinced that she, her son, and her son’s daughter, were the great-great-great-great-issue of John Hancock.
Who had died childless in 1793.
Oops.
In my grandmother’s defense, she’d probably heard about her family’s non-existent connection to John Hancock during the Colonial Revival of the early 20th century. This was the era when middle class Americans, enthralled by the magnificent art, architecture, and historical monuments they’d seen in Europe during World War I or on the Grand Tour, were determined to explore their own glorious past. Books like The Flowering of New England, art like Wallace Nutting’s tinted photographs of quaint cottages, wealthy collectors like Electra Havemeyer Webb finding value in cigar store Indians: all fueled a new, and somewhat less than critical, interest in the early days of the Republic.
Furniture modeled after 18th century originals, fashions allegedly inspired by post-Revolutionary styles, linens from the Deerfield Society of Blue and White Needlework, restored hostelries where George Washington (or Paul Revere, or even possibly John Hancock) had allegedly slept – these were only a few of the ways that early 20th century Americans explored the culture and folkways of their country. It’s no accident that many of the living history villages that dot our landscape, from Colonial Williamsburg to Old Sturbridge Village, were founded soon after the doughboys came marching home.
A great many families, especially of the white Anglo-Saxon persuasion, were so caught up in the Colonial Revival that they seized upon the merest hints that they might have some connection to the hardy patriots of that earlier time. That my grandfather actually had such a connection thanks to Evan Evans was a fine thing – but wouldn’t it have been even finer if his wife could claim descent from the bold, brave man who’d signed his name in large enough letters that King George would be able to read them without his glasses?
Whether my grandmother actually knew that Hancock had only had two children, neither of whom survived to adulthood, is of course impossible to determine. My mother never questioned what she’d been told, and neither did I until I happened to read a passage in Esther Forbes’ Paul Revere And The World He Lived In that made it clear that John Hancock was not my forebear.
I wasn’t very happy to learn this. Not only was I quite proud of being related to the man for whom they’d named an insurance company (and later a big, bland skyscraper that shed so many glass panels it had to be clad in plywood while its owners figured out how to keep the whole thing from being blown into Copley Square), I’d even modeled my own John Hancock after his. Finding out that Mum (and my grandmother) had been wrong was a cruel blow for a teenager.
Fortunately for me, my revelation came in sufficient time for me to avoid boasting about my illustrious ancestry at college. Smith in the 70’s may not have been the bastion of old money and older families it had been a generation or so earlier, but when one’s housemates include scions of men and women who were drinking buddies of Myles Standish, claiming descent from a childless man would have been the rough equivalent of Greg Louganis missing the springboard completely and splatting himself on the judging platform next to the diving pool.
I am scarcely the only person who’s been told a family story, taken it as fact, and found out much later that Great-Aunt Hepzibah not only wasn’t the mistress of B. Bradley Gotbucks VI, Esq., but had never actually left Great Auk Nest, North Dakota. An awful lot of us hear those stories about colorful ancestors and their colorful doings, and as disappointing as it to learn that the closest Great-Aunt Hepzibah got to Mr. Gotbucks was a mutual love of deep-fried lutefisk, most of us get over it. Absent a letter by Great-Great-Uncle Melchizedek telling his brother Jehosophat that Hepzibah had absconded to wicked, evil Grand Prairie with the egg money and come home with in Mr. Gotbucks’ private railway carriage, we shrug and go on with our lives.
Tonight’s author is a notable exception to this rule. He swore to his dying day that not only had he had taken a few scraps of family lore and proved it accurate, but that his family legend was nothing less than the story of a significant portion of the American population. That the story might have been somewhat embellished (or possibly not even his), or that someone else might have been instrumental to his (and its) success, never seemed to bother him or his fans. He’d done a grand and glorious thing, tracing his family back to its ancestral home against impossible odds, and anyone who said otherwise was either greedy, a bigot, or possibly both.
The author in question was Alex Haley. The book was Roots: The Saga of an American Family. You may have heard of them.
Alex Haley was the first child of Simon Haley, a professor of agriculture at Alabama A&M University, and his wife Bertha. Born in 1921, he was a bright, promising child, and it surprised no one when he enrolled at Alcorn State University at the tender age of 15. His father had done the same thing as a teenager, and he must have been pleased to see his eldest follow in his footsteps.
Simon Haley was less happy a couple of years later when Alex, who was intelligent but had a weak work ethic, left college and came home. Haley pére decided that young Alex could use a dose of good, old-fashioned military discipline to whip him into shape, and prevailed upon him to enlist in the Coast Guard. This Alex did in the spring of 1939, and despite military segregation that kept him out of every career path except mess attendant/steward, he liked military life enough that he stayed in the Coast Guard for the next twenty years.
This period proved crucial to Alex Haley’s later life. Despite the looming threat of war in Europe and the Far East, much of his shipboard life was about as exciting as watching seawater desalinate. He began a voluminous correspondence with his friends and family back home to pass the time, and his messmates noticed. Before long Haley was making extra money writing letters home for his messmates who either didn't have the time or the facility with words to compose much more than
“Dear Mom and Dad. I am well. Say hello to everyone. Must go grease the guns. Love, Sonny Boy”
or
“Dear Sallie, I miss you lots. Please write soon, I miss you. Please kiss the baby, I miss you both, Love always, Your Husband.”
Being a poor salt’s Cyrano de Bergerac may not sound like the beginning of a literary career, but Alex quickly found that his talents extended beyond writing heartfelt letters to people he'd never met. Less than a year after his enlistment he was confident enough to send articles off to Coast Guard Magazine, and by 1944 they were actually publishing his work. He also began writing and editing a ship's newspaper aboard his wartime posting, the cargo ship Murzim. One of his articles for this worthy publication, a melancholy piece about how disappointing it was when mail call came and went without a letter from home, was picked up by the civilian press and reprinted in several stateside newspapers.
The Coast Guard may have been segregated, but talent like this could not be denied. Sometime in 1945 Haley was relieved of his steward’s duties and given the editorship of the grandly named “Outpost,” the official magazine of the Personnel Separation Center. Other writing assignments followed, and by 1949 the brass finally saw the light and transferred Haley, still technically a steward, into the Journalism rating. In 1952 he become the first (and, for many years, only) Chief Journalist in the Coast Guard, and by the time he retired ten years later he was not only renowned for his energy and literary skill, but convinced that he had what it took to make a go of it as a journalist in the civilian world.
His family was not precisely enthusiastic about this; his siblings had both gone on to college and professional careers, and they regarded Haley's dream as a waste of time and talent. His wife, Nannie, whom he'd married in 1941, was equally dubious. They had a family to feed, clothe, house, and educate, none of which would happen on a freelancer's sporadic income.
Haley would not be deterred. He knew his worth as a writer even if the rest of his family did not, and despite the usual vicissitudes of the writer's life, he persevered. He wrote, and he wrote, and before long he started to get assignments from the “slicks,” the prestigious, well paying monthlies and quarterlies that had been the backbone of American popular letters for the first half of the century. He eventually rose to become an editor at Reader's Digest, all the while continuing to work as a freelancer.
Chief among these markets was Playboy, which had overcome its origins as a high-class skin magazine to become a respected, if somewhat racy, source of fine fiction, solid articles, and insightful interviews with noteworthy citizens. Haley was one of Playboy's first, and best, at the latter, interviewing a long and glittering list of celebrities that ranged from Miles Davis and Sammy Davis, Jr., to Johnny Carson and Quincy Jones. Perhaps his greatest moment came when he sat down to talk with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in what would prove to be King's longest interview, but Cassius Clay's announcement that he planned to change his name to Muhammed Ali and take a stand against the Vietnam War wasn't far behind.
Haley also interviewed George Lincoln Rockwell, head of the American Nazi Party, who agreed to the interview only after Haley confirmed that no, he wasn't Jewish, just African-American. Haley, ever the professional, managed to get a solid if controversial interview from Rockwell, who was not exactly consistent in his bigotry or he never would have agreed to meet with Haley in the first place. That he managed this even though Rockwell kept a handgun in plain sight throughout their time together is a tribute to the man's nerves and his ability to focus on the ultimate goal rather than his immediate circumstances.
America's Greatest Nazi was scarcely the only controversial person Alex Haley worked with during these heady years. He also ghost-wrote The Autobiography of Malcolm X, the 1965 masterpiece chronicling the life and ideas of the great radical leader. He'd met X a few years earlier during his research for a story on the Nation of Islam for, of all publications, Reader's Digest, and X had been impressed enough to stay in touch with Haley until the time came to work on his own book.
The Autobiography, based on over fifty penetrating interviews conducted during the last two years of X's life, came out to great acclaim shortly after X's assassination. The project had nearly derailed at the very start, when X insisted on talking about Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammed instead of himself, but Haley managed to get it back on track with a question about X's mother. The result was a masterpiece that shaped a generation's thought and action, served as the basis for the classic Spike Lee film, and has never been out of print. Time proclaimed it one of the ten most influential non-fiction books of the 20th century in 1998, and if Alex Haley had never written another word, his literary reputation would have been secured.
That is not what happened.
All the years that Haley had been in the military, raising his children, and establishing himself as a journalist, he'd had another project in mind. This most personal effort, which became something of an obsession, stemmed from the tales his grandmother Cynthia had told him of the earliest generations of the family to live in America. Details were vague since at least some of the information had been passed down orally for nearly two centuries, but the core of the story was this:
The Haleys and their kinfolk were descended not just from freed slaves like so many other African-Americans. They could trace their descent to an actual individual, a man who'd been kidnapped after a blissful childhood in Africa, endured the hideous Middle Passage to the American colonies, and sold to the Waller family of Virginia in the 1760's. The African, who'd fought to retain his birth name and some shreds of his culture, had been crippled during an escape attempt and had spent the rest of his life in bondage. His spirit had never been broken, though, and despite a hard life in a new land, had kept enough of his African heritage that he called a guitar a ko to the end of his life.
There was more – the African's daughter, grandson, and other relatives also had a part to play – but Haley was particularly fascinated by the idea of the African. His career as a journalist had honed his skills as a researcher and interviewer, and he began looking for evidence that his grandmother's stories about her family had been more accurate than my grandmother's tales of John Hancock.
He looked, and he looked, and every time the quest ended in a dead end, he looked somewhere else. Genealogical records in Virginia...secondary sources on American chattel slavery and the African-American experience...linguistic research into which African languages called a guitar or guitar-like instrument a ko...what began as an attempt to confirm a family story became an obsession. He lectured on his family story, on how his trust in oral history was proving justified, wrote draft after draft, even spent money he barely had to travel to Africa to see if he could find even the slightest hint that what his grandmother had taught him was more than a romantic story the family had created to deal with the horrors of the slave era. He lost Nannie to divorce, married and divorced another woman, and finally moved to Jamaica to escape his creditors and try to find the peace and quiet he needed to try to wrestle everything he'd learned into publishable form.
Yet a third woman, a freshly minted PhD named Myran Lewis who'd turned down a job at Harvard to be at his side, joined him in Jamaica as he fought to bring his great work to completion. It would not be a straightforward history, nor a fictionalized account of his ancestors. No, Haley would take a leaf from Truman Capote, originator of the “non-fiction novel,” to produce what he called “faction”: novelized fact. This would allow him to tell his family's story in all its drama, tragedy, and glory in a way that would bring the African and his descendants to life. White Americans had their legends and their creation story of the Puritans and the Jamestown settlers, Paul Revere and Ben Franklin and John Hancock. Alex Haley's ancestors, wrenched from the beauty and peace of the Gambia, would do the same for every African-American whose family history ended with the disruption and horror of slavery.
At long last he finished the book and sent it off to a publisher. Rumors swept through the literary world that something extraordinary was about to happen, that the man who had made Malcolm X a household name and interviewed a gun-wielding Nazi without batting an eyelash had created a masterpiece. The book came out to tremendous fanfare in August of 1976, not quite six weeks after the Bicentennial of the country that had both enslaved and freed the Haleys and their forebears.
It was called Roots: The Saga of an American Family. You may have heard of it.
If Alex Haley had hoped that his book would bring his family story the attention he deserved, he more than succeeded. Roots debuted at #5 on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list, climbing to #1 by November of 1976 and remaining there until early in 1977. Reviews were overwhelmingly positive, and Haley was lauded as the man who'd raised the African-American experience in America to stand beside the Irish, Italian, Eastern European, Japanese, and Jews as immigrants (albeit unwilling ones). Women named their children after characters from the book (including at least one set of twins named “Kunta” and “Kinte”), The Pulitzer Prize committee gave Roots a special award for its cultural impact, the 1977 miniseries was watched by millions and won a slew of Emmys, and uncounted numbers of Americans of all ethnicities and races began tracing their origins. There was even a Saturday Night Live parody starring John Belushi as “Bop Shoo Wop, son of Sha Na Na, grandson of the great holy man, Shboom Shboom,” who is renamed “Peggy Fleming” by his master, Steve Martin.
That doesn't even touch on the second television series (Roots: The Next Generation, in 1979, or the 1988 Christmas special Roots: The Gift, or the sequel Haley began based on the story of Haley's grandmother Queen, or all the ancillary merchandise, special editions, VHS tapes, etc., etc., etc., that emerged in subsequent years.
Sometime during all this madness, Haley found time to marry My Lewis, who had been so helpful to him as he completed his masterpiece. He was twenty-six years her senior and had become increasingly distant since Roots had become a phenomenon rather than a book, but the passage of time would take care of that. Haley had done what he'd set out to do, and life was very, very good.
It was about that time that the lawsuits started.
One, filed by novelist and poet Margaret Walker (Alexander), claimed that Roots was a ripoff of her book Jubilee. Walker, a respected African-American poet and teacher, had spent thirty very painful years working on Jubilee, which was based on the life of her great-grandmother before and during the Civil War. It was intended as a rebuttal to “moonlight and magnolias” books like Gone With The Wind, and Walker was not pleased to see what she regarded as a ripoff of her work becoming an instant classic.
This suit was dismissed on the not unreasonable grounds that Margaret Walker could not copyright the facts of slavery and its aftermath. The second lawsuit was another matter.
Harold Courlander was a respected novelist, folklorist, and academic with a long and distinguished career researching and writing about African-American, Native American, Caribbean, and African folkore and history. Among his honors were three Guggenheim fellowships, a Ford Foundation publication grant, a Newbery Honor Award for a young adult novel, and numerous awards for his work as a folklorist, sociologist, and ethnographer. He'd even helped establish the Folkways Library of folk music recordings that did so much to preserve folk music throughout the United States and the rest of the world during the post-war era.
He also wrote a novel called The African in 1967. I very much doubt you've heard of it.
The African, written for young adults, is a very good book. Honored by an American Library Association as one of its best books for young people, it told the harrowing story of a boy, Hwesuhunu, who is kidnapped, endures the horrors of the Middle Passage, and must somehow maintain his tribal identity and African traditions despite the horrors of his captivity....
If this sounds rather like the opening chapters of Roots, give yourself a special GTPOD Golden Head Tuft award and a pat on the back. The similarities between the tale of Hwesuhunu and the early years of Kunta Kinte are not exact, but they are close enough that Harold Courlander decided to assert his copyrights and brought suit against Alex Haley for plagiarism in 1978. Not only that, Courlander, ever the academic, submitted an analysis by Columbia University professor Michael Wood detailing Haley's abundant “borrowing” of phrases, situations, plot twists, characterization, and set pieces from Courlander's work.
This time the court decided that, unlike Margaret Walker, Harold Courlander had shown enough similarities between his book and Roots to merit a trial. Haley claimed, more than once, that he'd never read or even heard of The African before Courlander filed suit, and his wife backed him up, at least to a certain extent. She worked extensively with him on the bulk of novel during their time in Jamaica and had never seen so much as a quotation from The African.
Unfortunately for her, and her husband, the bulk of the alleged borrowings seem to have been in the first few chapters of Roots, which Haley had composed before he'd even met My, let alone collaborated with her. There were so many that even the trial judge, Robert J. Ward, was moved to say during the trial that “Copying there is, period,” and later told the BBC that Alex Haley, far from bringing his family story to triumphant life, had “perpetrated a hoax upon the public.”
Haley, recognizing when he was beat, settled with Courlander for $650,000 and a statement apologizing that “materials” from The African “found their way into his book, Roots.” It was just as well, too, since soon after the trial Skidmore minority studies professor Joseph Bruchac III claimed that not only had he discussed The African with Alex Haley in 1970 or thereabouts, he'd given Haley his own copy of the novel as a present.
Oops.
Roots continued to sell well enough for Haley to buy property in Tennessee and elsewhere, support My in California, and maintain a separate apartment that may or may not have been the location of meetings of a less than innocent nature with yet more women, but the plagiarism accusations irrevocably tainted the book's reputation. Worse, it soon found itself under assault as more fiction than fact. Historian Donald R. Wright pointed out that the climax of the book, where Haley's reliance on oral tradition is vindicated by the griot of Kunta Kinte's home village Juffure, smacked more of American storytelling conventions than the actual function or role of a griot. Not only that, Juffure had been a bustling market town, not the bucolic paradise depicted in Roots, the alleged griot was not even the most knowledgeable historian in his neighborhood let alone Juffure, and griots relied on oral histories that were only reliable back about a century, not the two hundred years Haley claimed.
I repeat: oops.
If that weren't bad enough, Haley also came in for heavy criticism for his alleged genealogical research thanks to an article by Elizabeth Shown Mills and Gary B. Mills in 1984 excoriating him for research so sloppy as to verge on deliberate falsification. Highlights included written records indicating that s the Waller family slave “Toby” was not crippled during an escape attempt, had belonged to the Wallers in 1762 (five full years before Kunta Kinte had allegedly been kidnapped and brought to Virginia), and had neither known nor married a woman named Bell at the Waller family mansion since neither had existed during the relevant date range. Almost none of what Haley had claimed was supported by surviving records, which in any event were so extensive that his repeated statement that he'd had no choice but to rely on oral history was simply not correct.
For the third time: oops.
Roots could still claim to be a brilliant miniseries and the catalyst for much of the genealogical work of the past forty years, but these days the historical community sees it as a melodramatic novel spiced with a few bits of family lore. Even Alex Haley's good friend Henry Louis Gates, Jr., says that “Most [historians] feel it's highly unlikely that Alex actually found the village whence his ancestors sprang. Roots is a work of the imagination rather than strict historical scholarship. It was an important event because it captured everyone's imagination.”
The rest of Alex Haley's life was something of an anticlimax, which should not have been a surprise. He traveled, lectured, attempted to defend Roots against genealogists and historians alike, and bought a farm near his maternal family's home in Tennessee in hopes of setting up a conference center. All the while he continued to be married to My even though they no longer lived together, may or may not have had other female companionship, and managed to compartmentalize his existence so neatly that by the time he died of a heart attack in 1992, most of his family had never even met My, let alone recognized her at the funeral.
He also left an estate crippled by so many conflicting documents that family members showed up with no fewer than seventeen lawyers at the actual burial service to try to settle conflicting claims among his current wife, his former wife, his siblings, his children, and pretty much everyone except all the children who'd been named “George,” “Bell,” “Kizzy,” “Kunta,” and “Kinte” in honor of his alleged ancestors. Haley's papers were auctioned off in lots that rendered them all but useless to future historians, there was a fight over whether My Haley had the right to complete Haley's unfinished manuscripts, and Haley's farm ended up in the possession of the Children's Defense Fund.
Eventually the dust settled enough that Haley's final book, the story of his other grandmother, was completed by David Stevens and filmed for television as Alex Haley's Queen in 1993. The movie did well in the ratings and was released on both VHS and DVD, but despite a glittering cast headed by a young Halle Berry, it failed to garner the critical acclaim of its predecessor.
Alex Haley has been gone for over twenty years. Despite the legal and historical tangle produced by his most famous book, it's safe to say that few authors have had a greater or more lasting impact on America culture in the last half century. The Autobiography of Malcolm X is a genuine classic, and Roots sparked a sea change in the way that Americans regarded their ancestors and their history.
That the author of these seminal works was less than careful with his sources, less than caring toward his family, and less a historian than a novelist does not diminish this. In the end, all that will remain are the books themselves, for good or ill, and their impact upon America and the world.
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Did you, like everyone else, watch Roots when it first came out? Did you read the novel? Have you ever heard of Harold Courlander? Myran Lewis Haley? Do you have an Ancestry.com account? We're all immigrants in this great land – how many of us share similar stories? Now's the time to share....
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