Aboard the African Star
After working on the book for more than a decade, Haley was stuck -- and
desperate
I just love to get out in the ocean. You are really out there, thinking in
ways you haven't thought before. The best writing I ever possibly could do
was after The Digest helped me go to Africa and Europe, and I was not
known
and I could just take my time and nobody was pressing me. God, I don't
know
how long it took me. I was working slowly, slowly. When I had done all the
research, nine years, working in between doing articles for other
magazines,
I was 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 cargo ****p. I went from Long
Beach, California, completely around South America and back to Long Beach.
It was 91 days.
There's something about a ****p. Usually I go out on freight ****ps, cargo
****ps. (I wouldn't get caught on a liner. How can you write with 800
people
dancing?) But the freight ****ps carry a maximum of 12 people, and they
tend
to be very quiet people.
I work my principal hours from about 10:30 at night until daybreak. The
world is yours at that point. Most all the passengers are asleep.
I had written from the birth of Kunta Kinte through his capture. And I had
got into the habit of talking to the 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 talk to him. And I had become so attached to
him
that I knew now I had to put him in the slave ****p 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 40 pages and chunked it out. 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 in somewhere around about the fourth rewrite.
I wrote, twice more, about 40 pages and threw it out. And I realized what
my
bother was: I couldn't bring myself to feel I was up to writing about
Kunta
Kinte in that slave ****p 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 ****p coming from Africa to Florida. I just wanted to simulate the
crossing.
I went down to Liberia, and I got on a freight ****p called appropriately
enough the African Star. She was carrying a partial cargo of raw rubber in
bales. And I got on as a passenger. I couldn't tell the captain or the
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 metal ladder down to the bottom of the hold.
Down
in there they had a long, wide, thick piece of rough sawed timber. They
called it dunnage. It's used between cargo to keep it from ****fting in
rough
seas.
After dinner the first night, I made my way down to this hold. I had a
little pocket light. I took off my clothing to my underwear and lay down
on
my back on this piece of dunnage. I imagined I'm Kunta Kinte. I lay 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 night I'm there 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 bad. And instead of going down in the hold, I went to the
stern of the ****p. And I'm standing up there with my hands on the rail and
looking down where the propellers are beating up this white froth. And in
the froth are little luminous green phosphorescences. 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
was
on my case. Why don't you finish this foolish thing? You ought not be
doing
it in the first place, writing about black genealogy. That's crazy.
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. I thought to myself, Hey, there's a cure for all this.
You don't have to go through all this mess. All I had to do was step
through
the rail and drop in the sea.
Once having thought it, I began to feel quite good about it. I guess I was
half a second before dropping in the sea. Fine, that would take care of
it.
You won't owe anybody anything. To hell with the publishers and the
editors.
And I began to hear voices. They were not strident. They were just
conversational. And I somehow knew every one of them. And they were saying
things like, No, don't do that. No, you're doing the best you can. You
just
keep going.
And I knew exactly who they were. They were Grandma, Chicken George, 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 in 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 I 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.
And it was about midnight when I kind of got myself together. Then I got
up,
and the feeling was you have been *****sed and have 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 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. I kept them on because I was having such a bad
cold. I lay down on the piece of timber.
Now Kunta Kinte was lying in this position on a shelf in the ****p, 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. And that was how I did every night, only
ten
nights. From there to Florida. I remember ru****ng through the big, big
Miami
Air****t. Flew back to San Francisco. Got with a doctor, and he kind of
patched me up.
I sat down with those long yellow tablets and transcribed. And I began to
write the chapter in Roots where Kunta Kinte crossed the ocean in a slave
****p. That was probably the most emotional experience I had in the whole
thing.
Come around about 1:30 in the morning, you've been working since 10:30 and
decide you're going to take a little break. So you get up and you walk up
on
the deck. And you put your hand on the top rail, your foot on the bottom
rail, and you look up. The first most striking thing is, man, you look up
and there are heavenly objects as you never saw them before. You find
yourself looking at planets at sea. And what you start to realize, you
never
saw clear air before. In some latitudes, down off West Africa, South
America, on the night of a full moon, there are times you get into an
illusion -- if you could just stretch a little further you feel like you
could touch it. And you are out there amidst all Gods firmament and then
you
stand and you feel through the soul of your shoe a fine vibration and you
realize that's man at work. That's a huge diesel turbine, 35 feet down
under
the water driving this ****p like a small island through the water. Still
standing there, now you start hearing a slight hissing sound. You realize
that's of the ****p cutting through the resistance of the ocean. With all
that going on, feeling these man things and seeing the God things, that's
about as close to holy as you are going to ever get.
Edited from a talk at Reader's Digest, October 10, 1991, four months
before
Alex Haley's death
Excerpted from the book Alex Haley: The Man Who Traced America's Roots by
Alex Haley. Copyright © 2007 The Reader's Digest Association, Inc.
Published
by The Reader's Digest Association, Inc.; April 2007; $17.95US;
978-0-7621-0885-5.
Alexander Murray Palmer Haley (1921-1992) was an African American writer
who
was best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Roots. A writer of
distinction and a contributing editor for Reader's Digest, Haley's first
major work was The Autobiography of Malcolm X, published in 1965.
Growing up, Haley had heard stories about his African ancestor, Kunta
Kinte,
and became interested in tracing his family to its deepest roots. It was
Lila Acheson Wallace, cofounder of The Digest, who commissioned Haley to
do
the research that would create a groundbreaking article in the magazine.
When Reader's Digest published the first excerpts from Roots in our May
and
June 1974 issues, we said it was an epic work, "destined to become a
classic
of American literature." That has proved to be an understatement.
In just five months after the book hit stores in 1976, more than one
million
hardcover copies were purchased. Since then, Roots has taken its place
among
the greatest bestsellers of all time as the number of copies has grown to
over six million worldwide. Its impact on television was also historic:
Some
130 million Americans watched at least part of the 12-hour drama, making
it
the highest-rated miniseries ever.
Roots changed the way we think about race in this country and profoundly
affected the lives of many people, especially African Americans.
For more information, please visit www.rd.com/returnToRoots.do.
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