Let me tell you one thing more before we go. And I would like to share this ’cause we’re talking about the essence of writing now.
When I had done all the research, nine years, working in between doing articles for other magazines and stuff, I was now ready to write. I didn’t know where to go, didn’t know what to do. I knew I had a monumental task. And I got on a ship—this is where I started this freight ship thing called the Villager. And I went from Long Beach, California, completely around South America and back to Long Beach. It was ninety-one days. And I had written from the birth of Kunta Kinte through his capture. In the course of this, that’s where I got into the habit of talking to your character, I knew Kunta. I knew everything about Kunta. I knew what he was going to do. What he had done. Everything. And so I would just talk to him. And I had become so attached to him that I knew now I had to put him in the slave ship and bring him across the ocean. That was the next part of the book. And I just really couldn’t quite bring myself to write that. I was in San Francisco. I wrote about forty pages and chunked it out. You know writers know, and I know we’ve had this experience where you just know that ain’t it. That ain’t what you want to say. And when you write well, it isn’t a question so much of what you want to say, it’s a question of feel. Does it feel like you want it to feel? The feel starts coming into something around the fourth rewrite.
And then I wrote twice more about forty pages and threw it out. And I realized what my bother was. It was—I couldn’t bring myself to feel like I was up to writing about Kunta Kinte in that slave ship and me in a high-rise apartment. I had to get closer to Kunta. I had run out of my money at The Digest, lying so many times about when I’d finish, so I couldn’t ask for any more. I don’t know where I got the money from. I went to Africa. Put out the word I wanted to get a ship coming from Africa to Florida to the U.S. I just wanted to simulate crossing.
I went down to the country that was born of the U.S. People went there. What was it? Liberia. And I got a ship called, appropriately enough, the African Star. And I got on this ship. She was carrying a partial cargo of raw rubber in bails. And I got on as a passenger. I couldn’t tell the captain, who was such a nice man, nor that mate what I wanted to do because they couldn’t allow me to do it. But I found one hold that was just about a third full of cargo and there was an entryway into it with a long metal ladder down to the bottom of the hold. I’m sure most of you don’t know how big the hold of a ship is. But you could just about put this auditorium in the hold of some big ships.
Down in there they had, on the deck, a long, wide, thick piece of rough sawed timber. They called it dunnage. It’s used to store between cargo to keep it from shifting in rough seas. And what I did, after dinner the first night, I went down, made my way down into this hold. Had a little pocket light. I took off my clothing, to my underwear, and laid down on my back on this piece of dunnage. I imagined; I’m going to try to make believe I’m Kunta Kinte. I laid there and I got cold and colder. Nothing seemed to come except how ridiculous it was that I was doing this. By morning I had a terrible cold. I went back up. And the next day with my cold, the next night, I’m down doing the same thing. Well the third night when I left the dinner table, I couldn’t make myself go back down in that hold. I just felt so miserable. I don’t think I ever felt quite so badly. And instead of going down in the hold I went to the stern of the ship, the end of the ship, the back part. And I’m standing up there with my hands on the rail and looking down now where the propellers are beating up this white froth. And in the froth are little luminous, green phosphorescents. At sea you see that a lot. And I’m standing there looking at it and all of a sudden it looked like all my troubles just came on me. I owed everybody I knew. Everybody I knew looked like they were on my case. Why don’t you finish this foolish thing? You ought not be doing it in the first place—talking about writing about black genealogy.
That’s crazy. And so forth. All such stuff as that. And I was just utterly miserable, didn’t feel like I had a friend in the world. And then a thought came to me that was startling. It wasn’t frightening. It was just startling. And I make a point of saying it was not dramatic at all; it was just simply something that happened. I thought to myself, hey, there’s a cure for all this. You don’t have to go through all this mess. And what the cure was, was simply all I had to do was step through the rail and drop in the sea.
Now I say again, it wasn’t with any great dramatic thing at all; it just simply arrived at me. And once having thought it, standing there kind of musing about what I had just thought, I began to feel quite good about it. I’ve since read things—like people who were in a position about to freeze, felt warm, or something like that prior to. And I’m standing there; I guess I was half a second away from dropping into the sea. And it wouldn’t have made a difference. Fine, that would take care of it. You won’t owe anybody anything. The hell with it and all that. You can go. Hell with the publishers and the editors and all that and all this kind of thing.
And then again I stress it wasn’t dramatic; it was just sort of like everyone of us has been dreaming and you heard people speaking in a dream. And I began to hear voices, which were positioned behind me. I could hear them. They were not strident. They were just conversational. And I somehow knew every one of them. Who they were. And they were saying things like, no, don’t do that. No, you’re doing the best you can. You just keep going. You go ahead. And so forth. It was like that.
And I knew exactly who they were. They were Grandma. They were Chicken George. They were Kunta Kinte. They were my cousin, Georgia, who lived in Kansas City and had passed away. They were all these people whom I had been writing about. They were talking to me. It was like a dream.
I remember fighting myself loose from that rail, turning around and I went scuttling like a crab up over the hatch. And finally made my way back to my little stateroom and pitched down, head first, face first, belly first on the bunk and I cried dry. I cried more I guess than I’ve cried since I was four years old, at least it seemed so.
And it was about midnight when I kind of got myself together. I can’t really describe how it felt, but it was like recovering from a vacuum or something. Then I got up and the feeling was—you have been assessed and you’ve been tried and you’ve been approved by all them who went before. So go ahead. And then I went back down in the hold. I had a terrible cold, head cold, flu-ish like. I had with me a long, yellow tablet and some pencils. This time I did not take my clothing off like I’d been doing before. I kept them on because I was having such a bad cold. I laid down on the piece of timber. I had the tablet there, when I would think.
Now Kunta Kinte was lying in this position on a shelf in the ship, the Lord Ligonier. She had left the Gambia River July 5, 1767. She sailed two months, three weeks, two days. Destination: Annapolis, Maryland. And he was lying there. And others were in there with him whom he knew. And what would he think?
What would be some of the things they would say? And when they would come to me in the dark, I would write. You know how you can write kind of large looping letters on something.
And that was how I did every night, only eight nights. From there, to this country, to Florida and when I got to Florida, I remember rushing through the big, big Miami Airport. I came in at 1 AM and I had to go to the other end. Barely made the flight. Flew back to San Francisco. Got with a doctor, Kimbro was his name. And he kind of patched me up and gave me stuff and everything, antibiotics and all until I got ready.
And then I sat down with those long, yellow tablets and transcribed and then I began to write that part which is now in Roots as the chapter where Kunta Kinte crossed the ocean in a slave ship. And that was probably the most emotional experience I had in the whole thing. Again it all really goes back to here, Reader’s Digest, the morning the editors met at the place up there and said they believed in it and they would sponsor me. So, thank you.
A condensed version of a portion of this work first appeared in Reader’s
Digest in the May and June 1974 issues. Copyright © 1974 by Reader’s Digest Association. Copyright renewed 2002 by Myran Haley, Cynthia Haley, Lydia Haley and William Haley.
Copyright © 1974 Alex Haley. Copyright renewed 2004 by Myran Haley, Cynthia Haley, Lydia Haley and William Haley.
Alex Haley on the writing of Roots.
Special contents of this edition Copyright © 2007 The Roots Venture, c/o IPW LLC, 2049 Century Park East, Suite 2720, Los Angeles, CA 90067
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Haley, Alex.
Roots : the saga of an American family : the 30th anniversary edition / Alex Haley.
p. cm.
Originally published: Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976.
eISBN : 978-1-593-15466-0
1. Haley, Alex. 2. Haley, Alex—Family. 3. Haley family. 4. Kinte family. 5. African Americans—Biography. 6. African American families. I. Title.
E185.97.H24A33 2007
929’.20973—dc22
[B]
2007008822
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Alex Haley, Roots: The Saga of an American Family
(Series: # )
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