His Story Remade History

I have a way of losing track of time. Not knowing where I am and not knowing what month it is have been two of my failings for as far back as I can remember, and my memory is pretty good. Most of the time.

It’s just that I have a tendency to drift through life like some kind of helium-filled balloon, happy with the drift but not always paying attention to the ground below.

That’s how I missed Black History Month.

I told myself at the start of February that I was going to acknowledge the month by writing something about Alex Haley. Not just because he was a good friend, but because with “Roots” he helped us all understand the anguish and triumphs of an entire race, just at a time when we needed it most.

And I don’t even think he realized that.

He wasn’t the kind of guy to celebrate himself. He gave speeches mostly because he just liked to talk to people but shied away from the glory heaped upon him after “Roots” hit the bookstores 26 years ago.

I remember him trying to avoid a whole crowd of people who recognized him at JFK as we were about to fly from New York back to L.A. I’d been profiling him for the paper and was traveling with him on his first cross-country speaking tour. The crowd of mostly black people, many with tears in their eyes, wanted to be near him, to touch him and to thank him for bringing Kunta Kinte into their lives. And for helping to define a pain burned deep into their cultural memory.

Haley was both touched and confused by the adoration of the crowd, and as we managed to get away he said, a tremor in his voice, “I was just writing a book, not a bible.”

Haley died in 1992 at age 70. He’d telephoned a few days earlier just to say hello. He’d call periodically from wherever he was, even as far away as the island of Majorca, where he’d like to hole up and write. We’d been friends since the early 1950s when he was a public information officer for the Coast Guard in San Francisco, and I was a young reporter for the Oakland Trib.

He wanted to write and had seen my feature pieces in the paper and wondered if I’d like to freelance with him. We’d both do the research and then trade off doing the first draft of whatever magazine piece we were working on.

I can’t say it was the most successful writing team in history, because we both wanted to do the story exactly the way we wanted to do it. But it was the beginning of a friendship that nothing could damage.

We sold half a dozen or so magazine pieces here and there, but mostly we got together to just talk. I heard all about his boyhood in Henning, Tenn., and about how the Coast Guard had made him a “galley boy” aboard ship before he managed to talk his way into his present job, the first black man in the Coast Guard public information office.

We celebrated every time we sold anything, and the parties usually ended up costing more than we’d made from the sale, but it was the joy that mattered, not the money. I remember him saying, with a big laugh, “We’ll never get rich making nothing per story.”

Haley retired from the Coast Guard in 1962 and headed for New York. He moved into Greenwich Village, starved, wrote for whoever would buy his stuff, stayed one step ahead of his landlord and eventually produced “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” And then, with the financial help of Reader’s Digest, he began a 12-year journey of research that produced “Roots.”

I’ve lost track of how many millions the book sold and into how many languages it was translated. The TV miniseries based on the book was watched by more than 100 million viewers in 1977.

Haley was rich and famous beyond his wildest dreams, and it frightened him. I spent two weeks with him on that cross-country trip I mentioned earlier, and was surprised at how unnerved he was by his new stature. It was beyond author, beyond social historian, beyond storyteller. Like it or not, Alex Haley had transcended all that to become a racial icon. When he died of a heart attack in Seattle, we all lost a hero.

Six years later, 1,500 people from across the United States--celebrities and ordinary folks--gathered in a small Knoxville, Tenn., park to witness the unveiling of a statue in Haley’s honor. I was there.

It was a 13-foot-tall bronze representation of the man with a book on his lap, looking off toward eternity. At the time, it was the largest statue in the nation of any African American. Maybe it still is. His former wife, Nannie Haley, looked up at the sculpture by L.A. artist Tina Allen and said, “He doesn’t just belong to us anymore. He belongs to everybody.”

As I think back on my shy, unassuming friend and what he gave us, I realize that it doesn’t really matter that I didn’t write about him during Black History Month. He doesn’t need a month. Like Nannie Haley said, he belongs to us all.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. He is at [email protected]