But he would not relent. In his heart he believed that she would only get
better when she wanted to get better, and he had to give her that will.
"I wants you to be well an' happy," he said. "But if'n you cain't be
well, I wants you to be happy, an' if'n you cain't be happy, I wants you
to be well."
The tiny light that Queen could see in the distance grew stronger. All
sons of things that had never made sense before suddenly became clear to
her.
She didn't know how to be happy. No one had ever taught her. As a child
she was expected to serve and obey, but no one ever cared about her
happiness. She had been happy, briefly, in Decatur, but it was some other
she, the white side that the world rejected, and she had lived a lie, so
the happiness was a lie. She thought she'd been happy with the sisters
in Huntsville, but when Abner was born she realized that the sisters
didn't really care about her at all; they were using her for their own
selfish needs. She tried to be happy with Davis, but he was too concerned
with the pain of the world to be able to alleviate hers.
All her life she'd been trying to work out where she belonged, all her
life she had tried to fit in with what other people expected her to be,
but no one had ever asked her what she wanted. No one had ever asked her
if she was happy.
And then she realized that wasn't true. One man had asked her that
question.
"I loves you with all my heart,'" Alec said.
And she began to get better.
"She be pleased to see you," Alec said to Simon, as they pulled up outside
the institution. "She be better now you home. "
It was the perfect opportunity for Simon to tell his father of his plans,
but he could not do it until he had seen his mother. He looked at the
ugly building where his mother was incarcerated, and shivered slightly,
but his father would not take him inside.
"'Tain't fittin'," he said. "'Tain't a good thing fo' a young man to see.
"
782 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN
He arranged to have Queen meet her son in the garden. Simon waited
patiently under a tree, and tried to avoid looking at the few inmates who
were allowed outside to exercise. Their clothes were filthy, and their hair
matted, and one of them talked soundlessly to someone only she could see,
and another called on Jesus to deliver her. Simon felt pity for them, but
could not imagine his mother in the company of these unfortunate souls.
He saw Alec leading Queen to him. Her appearance shocked him, for she
seemed so old and frail, and so unlike her old self in this dull garb. He
wanted to snatch her up, and take her away from here, and never let her out
of his sight, and protect her always. He moved quickly to her, and when she
saw him, her eyes lighted up with joy, and she was, for a moment, herself
again.
"Oh, Ma," Simon cried.
She hugged him hard, held on to him, and moaned a little with the love of
him. Then she told him her secret.
"I ain't mad," she said.
Alec went and talked to the doctors, to discover Queen's progress, and to
give her the chance to talk to her son. Queen and Simon walked together in
the pretty garden, and he told her things that he thought might make her
happy, silly, trivial things, and made her smile, and laugh. Then,
carefully, he told her of his plans.
He was going back to A & T, just for one semester. He had money saved from
his summer job, and he would not have to do any part-time work to sustain
himself. He could devote all his time and attention and energy to his
studies. He believed he would get good grades, and wanted to prove to
himself that he could. Just for one semester. Then he could come home to
the farm, but he could not come back in failure.
It was better than the best Christmas she could remember. It was what she
wanted to hear from him, needed to hear from him, and it made her heart
sing.
"You can do it," she said, her eyes shining with pride. "It was meant to
be."
There was something else to tell her. He wasn't sure if now was the moment,
but she was his ma, and she deserved to know. Just as Bertha had deserved
to know the truth about
A WIFE AND MOTHER, LOVED 783
Queen's condition, and he had told her, and she had responded with care,
and affection, and concern. He had been very wrong to doubt that she
would.
"I've met a girl, Ma," he said,
For a moment, he thought he'd done the wrong thing. Queen's eyes
narrowed.
"And what's her name?" Queen demanded. "What she call herself, this girl
who's stealing my baby away from me?"
"Bertha," Simon said meekly. "Bertha Palmer."
Queen was silent, staring away from him, at something in the distance.
Then Simon realized something odd. She was laughing. She turned to him,
and she was laughing.
"Not my baby?" she said, "Not my little baby boy?"
He laughed with her. "Quite a big boy now, Ma," he said.
It wasn't so hard for Queen to let Simon go. She'd had to let go of
Abner, and that had pained her, but she had learned from it. And Abner
had not tied to her; he still loved her, and was more attentive to her
now, from far away, than ever he had been when he was home. So she let
go of Simon, and all she prayed for was that he be happy. Because now she
understood a simple truth. There was one man who loved her more than
anyone else in the world, and to expect more love than that from life is
simple greed.
Simon visited her every day for the week he was in Savannah, and on the
last day when he went to say good-bye, she hugged him and wished him
Godspeed and good luck.
He went back to Greensboro, and settled to his studies. He wrote to Bertha
regularly, and gave the good news of his progress, and of his excellent
grades. Then one day he was summoned to the president's office. It made
him nervous, because he could not imagine what he had done wrong.
But the president was fulsome in praise of his work, and gave him some
extraordinary news. A certain Mr. Boyce had written to ask the cost of
one full year's tuition, and then sent a check. It covered everything:
tuition, dormitory, meals, and books. Simon was speechless. Why had
someone he didn't know done this extraordinary thing? He hardly heard
what the president said after that, because all the dark clouds had
lifted from his horizon, and in his future he saw nothing but unbounded
joy.
784 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN
When he left the president's office, he walked across the lawn trying to
work out who his benefactor was.
Then the penny-or rather, the five dollars-dropped, and he remembered a
courtly, elderly man on a train, whose wife couldn't sleep.
He let out a whoop of exultation that shocked the students near him, and
leaped several feet into the air.
At about t
he same time, Alec drove his buggy to the institution to bring
Queen home. A nurse escorted her from the forbidding building and
delivered her to her husband. Alec put his arms around her, and hugged her
hard, then helped her into the buggy. They didn't speak very much on the
journey home, because they never spoke very much about the things that
were important.
It was a hot and dusty day, and when they got to the shack all was quiet.
Queen stared at the little house, loving it, loving being home.
"Dunno where's the family," Alec wondered. "They said they'd be here, to
meet you."
But Queen shook her head.
"It don't matter," she said. "This is all I need."
He helped her down, and held her arm, and took her into the quiet house.
Inside, as if from nowhere, there was a burst of color, and noise, and
people. Streamers flew around her, and all her family were there to
welcome her. Minnie and Julie with their husbands and children, and
Freeland with his wife and sons. George was there, with his family, and
Abner, who had tired of city life, and had come home for good.
Queen stood among them all, surrounded by their love, and could not keep
from crying.
That night she sat with Alec on the porch, rocking in their chairs, and
puffing on their pipes, as if she had never been away. They laughed about
the day, and gossiped about the family, and Queen thanked him for all he
had done for her.
... Tain't nuttin'," he said.
But it was something, she wanted to tell him, it was something of
enormous importance to her, but she did not know how to say it. She
realized something that shocked her. In all their years together, she had
never actually told him how much
A WIFE AND MOTHER, LOVED 785
she loved him. She had always assumed that he knew, but it was thoughtless
to make such an assumption. She sought for a way to tell him what was in
her heart, and an odd memory burst into her mind.
"Years ago," she said, "when I was a little girl, I lived in the big
house, my pappy's house, with my half brother William. We slept in the
same room, only he had a big four-poster, and I had a pallet at the foot
of his bed. We'd lie in bed and dream of our futures."
She was lost in memory.
"I always said that I was going to marry a prince on a white horse, and
William would laugh at me. 'Who's going to marry an itty-bitty slave girl
like you, QueenT he'd say."
She looked at Alec, and saw his gray hair, and knew that her own was at
least as gray, and her face lined, and her figure full, and that they had
grown old together. But that didn't matter, because in his company she
was a girl again, dreaming of the man she would marry, and he was a young
ferryman, who was kind to her.
"He shouldn't have laughed, because he was wrong. The only thing is, how
could I possibly have known that when I did find my prince, he wouldn't
be on a white horse. He'd be riding on a ferryboat, across a mighty
river."
Alec nodded gently. They sat together in silence, puffing on their pipes
and rocking in their chairs. Then he put out his hand to her. She reached
to him, and put her hand in his, and he grasped it hard, and when he
spoke, his voice was gruff with love.
"That's all right, then," he said.
92
Simon graduated from A & T College, and when World War I came, he enlisted
in the U. S. Army. He was sent to France, where, in the Argonne Forest,
shortly before the end of the war, he was gassed. After treatment in a
hospital overseas, he was returned home and mustered out of the army.
He received his master's degree at Cornell University, and went on to have
an outstanding career as Dean of Agriculture at AM & N College, in
Arkansas.
He married Bertha Palmer, and they had three sons. After Bertha's death,
Simon was married again, to Zeona Hatcher, and they had a daughter.
The grandchildren of Queen Haley by her son Simon were:
George, who became a lawyer.
Julius, who became an architect.
Lois, who taught music.
And Alex Haley, who became a writer.
786
Afterword
Alex was often asked how much of Roots was fact and how much fiction. I
have been asked the same question, and my answer is similar to his,
although less emphatic.
Most of the lineage statements in this book can be documented, except the
most critical one. I do not have in my possession written evidence that
James Jackson, Jr., fathered Queen, and I think it is unlikely that such
evidence exists. Queen believed it. Alex believed it. It was accepted,
in my presence, by several of the white descendants of the Jackson
family. Alex was welcomed by them as a cousin, and several of them
journeyed from Alabama to his farm in Tennessee to give him a memento of
The Forks of Cypress, and to welcome him, officially, into the family.
There is a major genealogical error, however, concerning the Jackson
family, and to them I apologize. In all my discussions with Alex, my
concern was for Queen and her direct lineage, and the early research
provided to me suggested that James Jackson, Jr. ("Jass"), was the
firstborn son of James and Sally Jackson. After Alex's death, when I
began work on the book, I uncovered later research that documented the
birth of an earlier son, Andrew Jackson Jackson ("A.J."). Obviously, Alex
was aware of this, but none of his notes for the novel gave me any
indication of how he intended to incorporate A.J: into the story. In
trying to find a path through the clutter of this nineteenth-century
family, and because A.J. hardly affected Queen's life, I have invented
an untimely death for him. In fact, he lived to a good age.
Beyond that, almost all the people are where they should be almost all
the time, although I have given a couple more years of life to Pocahontas
Perkins than she actually enjoyed, and her daughter, Lizzie, is bom a tad
earlier than in life.
787
788 AFTERWORD
Uncle Henry in Ireland and Uncle Hugh in Philadelphia have been combined
into one character.
I doubt that young James was ever called Jass, but as he, his father, and
his grandfather were all called James Jackson, I thought some clarifying
nickname was necessary.
I have also been asked how much of the book was written by Alex and how
much by me, and I find this impossible to quantify. I have a
seven-hundred-page outline provided by Alex, boxes and boxes of his
research are available to me, and some finished pages for the book, but
my major resource was Alex himself. His head was full of the stories that
constitute this work, and I spent two of the happiest and most informa-
tive years of my life listening to those stories and debating them with
him. Some scenes we wrote together, around the kitchen
table at his farm,
on a banana boat to Ecuador, and during journeys of exploration to the
South.
I am aware that some historians dispute some of Alex's conclusions. Given
certain constraints of time, I have done my utmost, and have employed
staff, to verify his research. In the mass of reference works we have
consulted, some few stand out: the several volumes of A People's History
by Page Smith; Reconstruction by Eric Foner; Michael Paul Rogin's Fathers
and Children, and specifically for Andrew Jackson, The Border Captain by
Marquis James. The diaries of Mary Chestnut were invaluable for
confin-nations of the society's attitude to relationships such as that
of Jass and Easter, as were several reference works about Thomas
Jefferson and his thirty-nineyear relationship with his slave mistress,
Sally Hernings.
I am keenly aware that this is not the book Alex would have written. Like
Roots, this was to have been a personal history of his family, and he
told it to me as such. But it is not my history, my family, or my people,
black or white. When Alex died, I had to move into new and unfamiliar
territories. Not a historian, I had to piece this history together, and
it is a period of high definition for many Americans. I am sure some will
be offended by my assumptions, and to those offended I can only shrug my
shoulders and say sorry.
Alex wrote the following statement about his intentions:
"This book will convey visceral America. For our land of immigrants is
a testimonial to the merging of the cultures of the world, and of their
bloodlines."
AFTERWORD 789
I am not American, but for me, the overriding achievement of Roots was
as a spectacular metaphor for the travails of every black family in this
country and their journey through history. In that sense Queen is also
a metaphor, a representative woman for the thousands upon thousands of
children of the plantation who were dispossessed of their families and
their heritage. I can only be grateful for this extraordinary opportunity
to pass on what Alex left behind, and grieve with all my heart the
circumstance that brought it about.
Alex Haley, Queen
(Series: # )
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