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Preface
    This book tells the story of Alex Haley, a tale whose significance is larger than one man’s biography. It is the story of the remaking of American society’s understanding of the black experience. Haley wrote the two most influential books on African American history in the second half of the twentieth century. Each of his books sold at least six million copies, and the films made from them were viewed and appreciated by the masses of Americans. Haley sold more books than any other African American author and all but a few white ones.
    He shaped the racial sensibilities of more Americans than any other writer, black or white. Although he was not himself a black nationalist, his works, more than any other writing, gave texture and substance to black nationalism. Haley and his work deserve to be recognized as seminal influences on black identity and American thought about race.
    The Autobiography of Malcolm X gave millions of Americans a look into the world of blacks in twentieth-century ghettos and especially the anger that life there engendered. The book made Malcolm into an icon of black manliness and resistance to oppression. Haley’s rendering of Malcolm created an archetype that challenged the image of the loving, nonviolent black male personified by Martin Luther King Jr. After Malcolm’s assassination in 1965, his influence on the popular imagination grew steadily, helped always by his autobiography, written by Haley.
    Roots cast slavery and the black family in an entirely new light. Haley retrieved the African past of black Americans for the benefit of all people, adding new depth to our understanding of the experiences of African Americans. He created memorable characters that live today in the minds of those who read Roots or who saw the television productions based on the book. He opened the eyes of millions of whites to the hard realities of black life over the generations and spurred a national movement among Americans, regardless of race or ethnicity, to seek their family origins. Along the way, Haley taught us that our families’ experiences actually composed the nation’s history.
    Despite the publishing success and the celebrity that came with it, controversy enveloped Haley soon after the publication of Roots and plagued him for the rest of his life. He was castigated personally and accused of malfeasance as a writer. The controversy hurt Haley’s professional reputation and to some extent undermined his works’ influence on American culture. This book tries to explain how and why that happened—and also why Haley should still be remembered and his books still read.

1
    Grandma’s Boy
    On a September evening in 1921, Simon and Bertha Haley drove into Bertha’s hometown of Henning, in western Tennessee, a village of five hundred souls lying in the lowlands not far from the Mississippi River. Bertha brought a present for her parents, Will and Cynthia Palmer. When Cynthia opened the door that night, Bertha thrust a blanketed bundle toward her mother, saying, “Here’s a surprise for you.” It was a six-week-old baby boy. Bertha had kept her pregnancy a secret from her parents. The concealment was odd, especially because Bertha enjoyed a loving relationship with her parents, and it probably indicated ambivalence about having a baby in her early twenties. 1
    Simon and Bertha had traveled a thousand miles from Ithaca, New York, where Simon was a graduate student at the Cornell University School of Agriculture. They were newlyweds, having met at all-black Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee, and married the previous year at the New Hope Colored Methodist Church of Henning. The nuptials had been grand by Henning standards. Will Palmer had bused in the Lane choir to perform at the wedding of his only child, a sign of the prosperity Will had enjoyed during his twenty-five years as proprietor of the W. E. Palmer Lumber Company. The clearest indication of