ALEXHALEYS
QUEEN
The Story of an American Family
ALEX HALEY
AND DAVID STEVENS
AVON BOOKS & NEW YORK
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that
this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed"
to the publisher. and neither the author nor the publisher has received
any payment for this "stripped book."
AVON BOOKS
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The Hearst Corporation
1350 Avenue of the Americas
New York, New York 10019
Copyright C) 1993 by the Estate of Alexandet Palmer Haley, Myran E.
Haley, and David Stevens Published by arrangement with the author
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 92-47089 ISBN: 0-380-70275-4
All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or
portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S.
Copyright Law.
Published in hardcover by William Morrow and Company, Inc.; for in-
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Inc., 1350 Avenue of the Americas. New York, New York 10019.
First Avon Books Printing: February 1994
AVON TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND IN OTHER COUNTRIES, MARCA
Printed in the U.S.A.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 21
Dedicated to the memory of Alex Haley
And to the African, Kanyuro, of the Kikuyu, who saved my life during a
small skirmish in an obscure war on the Kenya/Uganda border, and gave
me the priceless gift of the years since then.
Acknowledgments
The role played by David Wolper in Alex's career, and, latterly, my own,
is remarkable, but I would also like to record my gratitude to Bernard
Sofronski, who first had the idea of associating me with Alex and this
project.
My thanks also to Mark Wolper and John Erman. To Jeff Sagansky, John
Matoyan, and Larry Strichman. To Paul Bresnick, and everyone at William
Morrow.
To Louis Blau, and to George Haley, Alex's brother, and William Haley,
Alex's son.
To my agent, Irv Schwartz, who is the best, a pillar of support and a
valued friend. To Fiona McLauchlan and Daniel Donnelly, for their help
in research. To the staff at Alex's farm, who adopted me and nicknamed
me The Moonshine Kid, and especially Gertie Brummitt, who first let me
into the secret.
To Bubby, with love. And Rooney, Myrtle, Maggie, and Dudley. And Morgan,
whom we miss.
On Alex's behalf, it is ittcumbent on me to record his gratitude to Myran
E. Haley, his wife and valued associate, and to George Sims, his lifelong
friend and master researcher.
PART ONE
BLOODLINES
Hurra for the Hickory Tree! Hurra for the Hickory Tree! Its branches
will wave 0'er tyranny's grave And bloomfor the brave And the fi-ee.
-PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN SONG, 1832
On a cold and rainy April night, in a guarded garret somewhere in Dublin,
James Jackson 11, known as Jamie, swore a most sacred, solemn oath.
"In the awful presence of God, 1, Jamie Jackson, do voluntarily swear and
declare that I will form a brotherhood among Irishmen of every religion,
for equal, full, and adequate representation of all Irishmen. Not hopes,
fears, rewards, or punishment shall ever induce me to inform on, or to
give evidence against, any member of this society. So help me God."
It was the year 1797. Jamie was barely fifteen. There were eleven other
men in the room, for no cell of the illegal association could be larger
than twelve. He had been sponsored into the group by his uncle Henry.
Partly because of the eloquence with which young Jamie voiced his
convictions, partly because they needed every man they could get in the
fight against the occupying British, but mostly out of respect for his
uncle, not one black bean was cast against him.
Three months previously, a fleet of forty French ships carrying twelve
thousand men had sailed toward Bantry Bay, in southern Ireland, to drive
the British from the country. On the flagship, Indomitable, was Wolfe
Tone, who had persuaded Napoleon that the British could be defeated. The
weather went against them, and high winds and heavy rainfall frustrated
the landing of men from the French fleet. The storm raged for six days,
forcing the ships, one by one, to cut cable and seek safe harbor, until
the Indomitable stood alone. Then she too turned about and limped back
to France.
When news of the retreat at Bantry Bay reached Dublin Castle, Lord Clair,
the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, personally appointed by King George 111,
made a jubilant proclamation.
3
4 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN
"It was a Protestant victory! It saw God on our side!"
lie intensified the suppression of the United Ireland movement, he
ordered massive recriminations against the intransigent Irish peasants,
and finally he declared martial law.
The ferocity with which the British troops enforced his orders shocked
even the most moderate of men, and Jamie, appalled by what he saw, made
his decision and formally cast his lot with the Irish cause.
He was not the only member of his Protestant family to have made such a
dangerous commitment.
His older brother John had abandoned Ireland and gone to America with
three of his brothers, but his older sister Eleanor was married to Oliver
Bond, a leader in the secret association. His sister Martha had married
Hu-h Hanna, whom Jamie believed to be a "Peep 0' Day Boy," a vigilante
group mostly from the peasant class. Under cover of night, toward dawn,
the Peep 0' Days took what small vengeance they could against the
occupying British troops.
His sister Sara was engaged to Jimmy Hanna, Hugh's brother, who had been
tutor to Jamie when he was a boy in Ballybay, and had helped to awaken
his social conscience. Jamie's uncle, Henry Jackson, with whom he lodged
while he was at school in Dublin, was leader of the small cell that Jamie
had joined.
Yet Jamie was an unlikely revolutionary. The eleventh of twelve children,
he was bom to comparative wealth, and grew up in an atmosphere of
privilege and security. His father, James Jackson, owned many acres of
land and a linen mill at Ballybay, near Carrickmacross, in County
Monaghan. The British were well disposed to those native-born Irish who
espoused their religion and respected their authority, and James Jackson
had flourished under their colonial dominion.
A stem, intolerant man, James Jackson loved the English way of life, and
had little sympathy for the Catholic peasants. It appalled him that so
many of his children had chosen to embrace the nation
alist cause, and
thus put everything he had worked for and achieved, and their own
inheritance, at risk. He could not understand that it was the bloodless
austerity of his heart and manner that had driven his children to seek
love
BLOODLINES 5
and companionship in the camaraderie of political passion. He was
dispassionate toward his family and, except in matters of procreation,
detached frorn his wife. Other than the marital bed, his only passion was
his hobby, the breeding of champion racehorses.
When Jamie was eighteen months old, his mother gave birth to another boy,
Washington, and died four months later, at thirty-five, worn out from
childbearing and a loveless marriage. Jugs, the family housekeeper,
became surrogate mother to Jamie and his infant brother, and she came to
love Jamie as the son she had never had, and he basked in her affection.
Gravel-voiced, toothless, bosomy, and superstitious, the Catholic Jugs
had served in the Jackson household as loyal friend and confidante to
Jamie's mother, Mary Steele Jackson, whom she had nursed from infancy.
After Mary's death, she ran the house with peasant discipline, faced
trouble by first crossing herself and then wielding a big stick, and
tended toward earthy language after a few nips of her master's brandy.
She knew every Irish superstition in the book, and practiced most of
them, especially those that were said to placate the fairies.
It was she who introduced Jamie to the world outside his father's bleak
and loveless estate. Several times a week, Jugs went to visit her sister,
Maureen, and her husband, Patrick, a tenant farmer on the neighboring
Hamilton land. Maureen had a son, Sean, of Jamie's age and Jugs took
Jamie with her on these visits because she thought the boy needed a
companion. They became more than playmates. From widely diverse back-
grounds, Jamie and Sean quickly became fast friends, and grew up in each
other's company.
Maureen's simple home was paradise for a young boy whose own was cold and
formal. The cottage had a thatch roof, mud walls, an earthen floor, and
a vibrant sense of life, of passion and laughter and anger. The loom was
the largest piece of furniture, and in the winter the cow lived inside
with the rest of the family.
Jamie loved the simple formalities of peasant life. Whenever he went in
through the door he would say, "Blessings upon all I see," as Jugs had
taught him. He teamed some words of Gaelic. When Maureen churned butter,
she recited to him the
6 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN
legends of it. If milk splashed during the churning he would be doomed to
marry a drunken spouse. If someone "blinked" your cow, he learned how to
break the curse. When the butter finally broke, he twisted the staff three
times, and placed it over the mouth of the chum, and he helped her smear
a little of the butter on the wall of the cottage as an offering to the
fairies.
He loved the stories that the shanachies, the traveling storytellers,
recited of the leprechauns and the little folk, and he believed in the
fairies, who lived on the mist-shrouded Crieve Mountain nearby. He loved
the great history of the Gaelic people, and of the blessed Saint Patrick
who had converted them to Christianity, and had rid the island of snakes
by tapping with his staff upon the earth. He learned of the glories of
the time of kings and poets, and of the Viking raiders, who were defeated
at Clontarf by Brian Bom. He heard the long history of invasion by the
British, who were determined to subjugate the Emerald Isle, from Henry
11 to the ruthless, hated Oliver Cromwell. Of the Protestant settlers
brought from England and Scotland to be settled in the north, to reduce
the influence of the Catholics. He heard of repression and rebellion,
evictions and retaliations, and the suppression of the Catholic religion
that followed the Irish defeat at the Battle of the Boyne.
He wept when he heard the stories of the potato blight, and the awful
famine that followed, which decimated the population and forced many of
those who did not die to emigrate, mostly to America. He cursed the
British for what they did then, expropriating yet more land, because the
peasants, who could not afford to eat, could not pay their rent. He
gasped at the stories of the White Boys, who refused to pay tax, and rode
through the night cutting off the noses and cars of tax collectors, but
never harming the innocent.
He wept again at the tales of the reprisals against the White Boys, how
they put the tar cap of molten, burning pitch on the peasant's head, and
mocked him while he screamed in agony, unable to remove the fiery mess.
His blood ran hot at the stories of indiscriminate flogging and looting
and rape, or the British soldier's sport of setting fire to the hay in
a peasant's cart and ramming the flaming
BLOODLINES 7
cart into the man's house, laughing while the cottage burned. Most of all, he
loved Sean, and tried to emulate his hero in every way. A moderate and
studious boy, who grieved for the mother he had never known and sorely
missed his father's affections, Jamie found in the rollicking, boisterous
Sean a friend who filled the emotional void in his heart. Through the days
of their childhood they were inseparable, roaming the lanes between
Ballybay and Carrickmacross, the daring Sean leading the wide-eyed Jamie
into scrapes and adventures and pranks.
Sean taught Jamie to play the wild game of hurley, and how to cut turf
from the peat bogs, stack it in barrows, and take it back to the cottage
to dry, to be used as fuel for the fire. They visited Sean's father at
the Jackson linen mill, and Jamie watched in amazement the arduous labor,
as the flax was hackled and scutched, and the peasant women toiled over
great steaming kettles boiling the spun thread to purify it. They went
to the annual Ballybay Fair together, and reveled in the fun of it, the
tinkers and fiddlers, and the increasingly drunken peasants dancing
increasingly drunken gigs. They giggled at the man with the shillelagh
and long tailcoat who earned his living by challenging stalwarts to "step
on his coat" and fight with him. They watched the races, dazzled by the
bright colors of the silks the jockeys wore, and cheered the winners
until their throats were sore, and, at the subsequent auction, pretended
to bid for horses they could not afford.
When they grew older, and Jamie's father took a mistress, Sarah Black,
who lived in Carrickmacross, it was Sean who taught Jamie about girls,
and the great mysteries of sex, and it was Sean who first introduced
Jamie to the wonders of beer and poteen, for the boy could not understand
his father's faithlessness to the memory of his dead mother.
In all things they were as brothers, but although their ages were
similar, it was Sean who led and Jamie who follo
wed. They bridged, with
the easy bond of youth, the many chasms that their different positions
in society created for them, and they nurtured each other in spite of
these differences, and drew strength from them. Once Jamie had Maureen
crop his hair short, in the peasant-boy manner, the more to identify with
his sunshine friend. When he went home, his father whipped him,
8 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN
and forbade him to leave the house until his hair had grown out, and Jamie
kept his hair long after that.
So Jamie grew up with an appreciation of the life and hardships of the
mass of the people. His other world of his father's ambition, and of
class and privilege, bored Jamie, and made him long to be back with his
peasant friends. Yet he could not avoid that other life.
Much of Ballybay was owned by the Leslie family, impoverished minor
English aristocracy, who, lacking funds, were happy to accept the sometime
friendship and occasional loans of James Jackson, whom otherwise they
regarded as a man of 'trade and not of their social quality. For a while
they were prepared to consider the possibility of an acquaintance between
James Jackson's children and their own, and invited Jamie and Washington
to spend an afternoon with their own children. Dressed in their best and
sworn to good behavior by Jugs, they were driven by old Quinn, the
hostler, in a fine gig with handsome horses.
Jamie and Washington took a stiffly formal tea with the Leslie boy and
girl, attended by their governess, whose manners were as starched as her
dress and high collar. Afterward, they were taken outside to play in the
formal gardens of the small castle. They strolled politely through the
grounds until they came to a fence that bordered a cow pasture. Young Ja-
mie, the devil in him, dared the Leslie girl to run through the pasture
with him. She accepted.
The governess, furious, raced after them, calling on her charge to watch
her step, but it was too late. The girl slipped on a cow pat and fell to
the ground. When Jamie went to help her up, he slipped too, in the same
pat. The girl began to cry, and the governess berated Jamie for what he
had done. He was suitably contrite at first, but the sight of the primped
girl covered in cow dung was too much for him, and he started to laugh.
This infuriated the victim.
"Go away, you bloody Irish ass!" she cried. The governess boxed her ears
for her language but not her sentiments, dragged her away, and told Jamie
he was a horrid little boy, who was never to come near them again.
Old Quinn drove the boys home, his nose wrinkling at the
BLOODLINES 9
smell of cow manure coming from the seat behind him, but his eyes
twinkling with delight at the cheek of his young master. Washington was
in awe of his slightly older brother, and Jamie could not wait to tell
Sean.
That afternoon caused something of a change in Jamie's relationship with
old Quinn. Previously, the stable master had regarded him as a bit of a
nuisance, a bothersome boy who had to be taught to ride, and whose
presence in the stables distracted Quinn from his true passion, and
disturbed his precious Thoroughbred mares. Following the incident at the
Leslies', Quinn, who detested everything British except racing stock,
took more time with Jamie, and found in him a natural talent for riding.
He encouraged Jamie's interest in horses, and astonished the boy with the
breadth of his knowledge. He could recount the bloodline of every horse
in his stable, their ages, sires, and dams, back through several
generations. He instructed the boy in their care and management, he
advised him of the potential of any new colt, and by the time Jamie was
a young man, he had acquired much of Quinn's knowledge, as well as his
passion. All the animals were divided into separate stables, the racing
horses in one, the riding horses in another, and the workhorses in a
third, because, Quinn insisted, the bloodlines could not be mixed.