Haley's Comet

"Find the good and praise it."

            No matter where he lived, Alex Haley hung a strange framed collage in his home. It consisted of two unopened sardine cans, three pennies, a dime, and a nickel. Before he won fame and fortune as the author of the best-selling book Roots, that's all the food and money he had at one point. He was trying to eke out a living as a writer. He only made enough, he said, from freelance writing "to hang on by [his] fingernails."

            Growing up in the tiny west Tennessee hamlet of Henning, Haley didn't know what to do with his life. He entered college at 15 and remembers being "easily the most undistinguished freshman" there. When he was 17 in 1939, he dropped out to join the Coast Guard and served as a cook. During World War II, the Navy took command of the Coast Guard's ships. As a result, Haley did fairly hazardous duty on an ammunition ship in the south Pacific.

            On a lark, before shipping out, he bought a portable typewriter. To while away the lonely hours, he obsessively wrote 30 to 40 letters a week to friends and relatives. The resulting deluge of replies did not go unnoticed by shipmates starved for letters from loved ones. Soon they asked him to write love letters for them.

“A Wall of Rejection”

            When Haley wasn't peeling potatoes, he was the chief cook and bottle-washer for the ship's newsletter which contained news, personal profiles, and humor. After the war ended, Haley worked in the Coast Guard's Manhattan public relations office and became its Chief Journalist.

            Year after year, he dashed off submissions to all manner of magazines, even the lowliest celebrity and romance publications. The result? "A wall of rejection notices," a friend recalled.

            He never gave up and continued trying to break into big magazines after retiring from the Coast Guard in 1959. "When I first got bold enough to try [to sell a story to] Reader's Digest, I received a rejection slip with a very different, rather august approach," Haley recalled. "It read—"Dear Mr. Haley: We're sorry, but this does not quite jell for us.' That would just frustrate the hell out of me, because I had been a cook and I would get an image of too much water in the Jello."

            Slowly, his persistence paid off. He placed stories in Christian Science Monitor, The Atlantic, Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan (which was then a general-interest magazine), and, indeed, Reader's Digest.

             Finally, Haley rose to prominence by conducting Playboy Interviews, the most notable of which were with Martin Luther King (the longest interview he ever gave) and Malcolm X. He then wrote "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" which became a best-seller.

            As a child, Haley spent hours listening to relatives tell tales of family history. He had long wanted to write a book that explored his family's history. On the strength of his success with his Malcolm X book, Doubleday gave him an advance of $5,000 ($40,000 in today's money) to write a work titled "Before This Anger."

            It took 11 difficult years for Haley to complete what would become "Roots." He had severe writer's block. He was swamped by the research he felt he had to do to ground the book in reality. (He slept in the un-airconditioned hold of a freighter so he could get a sense of what it might have been like to have been a captive African making the Middle Passage.)

           He insisted that his book be marketed as non-fiction, even though scenes and dialogue set in the distant past were fiction. This decision would later bring Haley much grief when he faced two lawsuits alleging plagiarism. (One was dismissed, and Haley settled the other.)

The Lord’s Design

            On at least one occasion, his writer's block was so horrendous, he contemplated suicide. He was returning to the U.S. via freighter from Liberia where he had traveled and met with oral historians. Frustrated by his inability to put pen to paper and mounting personal debts, he found himself standing by the ship's rail.

            "The Lord's design…put me to a severe test," Haley remembered. He felt he was "just a millimeter from dropping into that sea." At that moment, the voices of his characters spoke to him, giving him the confidence to proceed.

            When "Roots" was published in 1976, the book was a sensation—like a comet crossing the American consciousness. Haley's motto had always been “Find the good and praise it.” Now he had done more to improve race relations than almost anyone else in American history.

Haley won a Pulitzer and the National Book Award. Ebony Magazine said Roots was the nation's number-one topic of discussion. The resulting TV miniseries spanned eight evenings—and the history of Haley's family from Africa to his birth—and was watched by 50 million people. Overnight, Haley became not just a celebrity (and wealthy) but also the nation's most prominent African-American.

            "All that money has almost no meaning to me," he said at the time. "I was broke for so long that I got used to being without money."

            He lived lavishly and flew on Reader's Digest's corporate jet. "I walked up the runway into the plane, and I looked around at seats for about fourteen people, but there was nobody but me…. There was a silver tray with all kinds of little sandwiches cut in circles, diamonds, and everything.

            "You can't comprehend what's happening to you. All your life you've been wishing to God somebody'd read something you wrote, and then all of a sudden this is happening." Haley remembered his first letter from that Reader's Digest editor. 
             "And the thought just came to me: 'Well, I guess it finally jelled.'"

MORAL: Better to try and be rejected than never
to have tried at all.

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