In 1964 and 1965, before he completed The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Haley took three trips that shaped his next project, “Before This Anger.” The contract he had signed with Doubleday in August 1964 remained in force after the publisher canceled Malcolm X. In early 1964 Haley went to London to do a Playboy interview with the actress Julie Christie, and when the interview was canceled, he visited the British Museum. There, he saw the Rosetta Stone, the second-century BCE artifact that displayed a message in three ancient languages, which enabled a French scholar to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs. Haley was excited by how the Rosetta Stone had unlocked “a door into the history of man.” He felt vaguely that it had personal significance, which finally dawned on him: he wanted to find the meaning of the words of his African ancestor.
When he went to Kansas City in October 1964 to help with his brother George’s campaign, he visited with his cousin Georgia Anderson, the last survivor among the women on Cynthia’s front porch. Georgia was thrilled to discuss Haley’s plans to write the family history. “Our history needs to be writ,” she said. “We can’t speck white folks to write our history for us. They’s too busy writin’ ’bout theyselves.” She told him to get on with the work. “Yo’ sweet grandma an’ all of ’em—dey up dere watchin’ you.” Haley returned for George’s swearing-in ceremony, at which Georgia said to Alex and his brothers, “Y’all chillen jes’ keep on. Go fowud! Go fowud, boys!”1
Then, on a Saturday in 1965, Haley went to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and looked at census records from Alamance County, North Carolina, for the years just after the Civil War. In the story told on the front porch, Alamance was the place where his great-grandfather Tom Murray lived before moving to Henning. He looked at frame after frame of microfilm of the 1870 census, and he was at the point of frustration when he found the names Tom and Irene Murray. Then he found a young child, Elizabeth. This was his Aunt Liz. Cynthia was not listed, he realized, because she was not yet born. Thrilled with his discovery, he returned for more research at the archives, the Library of Congress, and the Daughters of the American Revolution Library.2
These discoveries, coupled with Cousin Georgia’s exhortations, led Haley to change “Before This Anger” from a portrait of the 1930s South to the story of his family. He wanted to start with the original African taken into slavery. “His name no one seems ever to have heard,” he told Reynolds. Haley soon began calling him the Mandingo and reported that he “sired a number of children on the several plantations to which he was sold.” One of those children, the last one, Haley believed, told the Mandingo’s story to Chicken George, his great-great grandfather, who handed it down to Tom Murray. Tom told it to Cynthia and Liz, who repeated it to little Palmer Haley.
Alex began to think of his family’s experience as representative of all African American families. “In America, I think, there has not been such a book,” he told Reynolds. “‘Rooting’ a Negro family, all the way back,” was “part and parcel of the American saga.” He would recount the story “without rancor, which I do not feel.” The triumphal moment of the story would be George Haley’s political success. The book would be one that “America, the world needs to read,” he believed, and “I shall write it with love.” But he had much research to do first, and he pleaded for Reynolds to be patient. “All will be justified within this year. You watch!” Haley was promising the completed book by the end of 1965.3
Haley knew little about the experience of slaves in the South. Most of his impressions of slavery were from the novels Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Gone with the Wind and the movie adapted from the latter. His grandmother had reproved his mother for dismissing all discussion of slavery, and Haley realized by the 1960s that he was like Bertha—he had no “interest in slaves.”4 The history of American slavery was in the midst of a far-reaching revision in the 1960s, largely influenced by the civil rights movement. Younger historians rejected the view, promoted since the late nineteenth century, that slavery was a benign institution populated by happy slaves and kindly masters. Scholars began to offer a harsher view, but the interpretation that captured the most attention in the 1960s was that of Stanley Elkins, which drew an analogy between American slaves’ behavior and the way Jews in Nazi concentration camps cowered before their oppressors’ authority. Elkins suggested that, to survive their ordeal, slaves assumed the pose of “Sambo,” who was “docile but irresponsible, loyal but lazy, humble but chronically given to lying and stealing.” George Sims, helping Haley research “Before This Anger,” found a collection of two thousand slave interviews recorded by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. To Haley, the interviews duplicated the “stories and phrasings I had heard as a boy on the front porch in Henning.”5
In October 1965 Haley published an article entitled “My Search for Roots” in the Philadelphia Sunday Bulletin. “I have travelled thousands of miles to see and question our family’s oldest members. . . . Their narratives often were emotional experiences. Sometimes I had to take notes through tears.” He discussed the fact of white paternity in many black families. His paternal great-grandparent, a Confederate colonel named James Jackson, presided over an Alabama plantation. Haley revealed that he had already established the time—1766—that his ancestor had been brought on a slave ship to America. He intended to travel to the “slave coast” of Africa and then “return here, symbolically, by ship.” Haley reported happily that as he did genealogical research on his family, he encountered many other blacks doing the same thing.6
If Haley was getting well versed in American slavery, he knew almost nothing about Africa. Predominant in the minds of most Americans were images of Africans swinging on vines—acting very much like the apes with whom they shared the jungle. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan novels, and the many movies made from them, depicted Africans as dumb and superstitious, teased by white Europeans who called them “boy.” For Haley this was an uncomfortable view of his heritage, certainly as compared with whites’ pride in their European ancestry. He had no idea how the slave trade worked. Africans had not “simply walked into slave ships.” He knew nothing of the passage across the Atlantic. “What must it have been like for those Africans, naked, chained, terrified, in unquestionably small wooden ships, in particular when they got into rough seas[?]”7
At the end of World War II, no American university had yet treated the history of Africa as more than a study of European exploration and exploitation. Some academics thought that Africa was not a legitimate historical subject because there were few written documents other than those created by European colonial regimes. What little interest there was in Africa in the United States was shaped by American concerns. In 1941 the anthropologist Melville Herskovits at Northwestern University published The Myth of the Negro Past, in which he argued that there were many African cultural practices that survived in the lives of American blacks. But Herskovits came under attack from E. Franklin Frazier, an influential black sociologist, who suspected that the emphasis on African cultural survivals was an attempt to support innate, persistent biological and cultural differences between blacks and whites. Haley surmised that most scholars believed that “there was no legacy, the break had been absolute.” But he began doing research anyway, “digging out actual facts of African cultural life.”8
Interest in the study of Africa grew in the 1950s, spurred by the independence movement that spread across the continent. Thirty new African nations were chartered in the decade after 1952, and their creations were continuously reported in the West. Working with Malcolm had educated Haley about African political events. Herskovits developed the first academic program for the study of African history, assembled at Northwestern a large collection of African artifacts and historical material, and in 1957 started the African Studies Association. But Haley learned from his reading about Africa in 1965 and 1966 that he probably would not find what he was seeking about his ancestors in traditional, written sources. Having discovered most of what he knew from the stories his grandmother told, he believed that he would need oral sources.
As it happened, a scholar had just emerged whose work provided a strong rationale for using oral sources. In 1961 Jan Vansina, a Belgian anthropologist who had done extensive work in Central Africa, moved to the University of Wisconsin at the same time he published a seminal book, The Oral Tradition. This work considered the nature of oral evidence as an historical source and justified its collection and its use in history. Vansina wrote that the historian “using oral traditions finds himself on exactly the same level as historians using any other kind of historical source material. No doubt he will arrive at a lower degree of probability than would otherwise be obtained, but that does not rule out the fact that what he is doing is valid, and that it is history.”9
* * *
Almost as soon as The Autobiography of Malcolm X was in bookstores, Haley began promoting the development of a film based on it. Most of the celebrities he had known in San Francisco and New York worked in the movie industry. One could earn fame as a best-selling author, but great heights of celebrity were achieved on the big screen. He also wanted to sell the movie rights for the money it would bring in. The actor James Earl Jones expressed an interest in playing Malcolm on both stage and screen, and the film producer and director Elia Kazan wanted to bring Malcolm’s story to the New York stage. Marvin Worth, an agent for musicians, declared his interest in producing a film. James Baldwin was engaged to write both a play and a film script. When Haley told Paul Reynolds of the exciting prospects, Reynolds warned him that film and theater people often did not follow through with their plans. As he typically was, Reynolds was right.10
By June 1966 the autobiography had sold fourteen thousand copies in hardback, hardly the numbers of a best seller. Appreciation of the book had grown, however, owing to the veneration of Malcolm that spread after his death. The Black Power movement had exploded in the South in May and June as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ejected its white members and denounced nonviolence. The memory of Malcolm’s anger against whites and his projection of black manhood spurred the growth of black nationalism, especially among younger civil rights activists who had become frustrated with what they viewed as the slow pace of change. Nonetheless, for the moment, The Autobiography of Malcolm X did not solve Alex Haley’s financial problems.11
Haley’s magazine work diminished as he devoted more time to “Before This Anger.” He did have a memorable experience interviewing the American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell for Playboy. Haley was now paid $1,500 (about $11,000 in 2015 dollars) for doing an interview. Rockwell was an American eccentric, a career military officer until his fascist politics got him dismissed from the army. When Haley contacted him by phone about an interview, Rockwell asked if he was a Jew. Haley said no and chose not to mention that he was black. Meeting Haley in person, Rockwell received the writer but armed himself, placing a pearl-handled revolver on his chair. Haley’s first question was why Rockwell needed the gun when there were armed bodyguards all around. Rockwell answered that he received thousands of threats against his life. (Indeed, a member of his own organization would assassinate him the following year. Haley would later note that three of his early Playboy interview subjects were assassinated.) Rockwell declared, “It’s nothing personal, but I want you to understand that I don’t mix with your kind, and we call your race ‘niggers.’” Haley answered that he had been called “nigger” many times, but “this is the first time I’m being paid for it. So you go right ahead.” He followed that with, “What have you got against us ‘niggers?’” Nothing, Rockwell answered; he just thought blacks would be happier where they came from, and “white people in America simply aren’t going to allow you to mix totally with them.” Haley noted that the civil rights movement was concerned with equal rights, not miscegenation. Rockwell shot back, “Race mixing is what it boils down to in practice; and the harder you people push for that, the madder white people are going to get.” The interview continued in the style of a debate, with Rockwell expending much effort in denying the Holocaust.12
Later in 1966 Haley interviewed Sammy Davis Jr., the singer, dancer, and actor he had met in San Francisco in the late 1950s and with whom he had renewed his acquaintance at London’s Playboy Club in 1964. The interview proved to be one of Haley’s most enlightening efforts in what it revealed about the struggles of a black celebrity. Whereas Miles Davis had confidently expressed anger over racial indignities, Sammy Davis revealed to Haley the vulnerability he had felt continuously, beginning with his childhood days of performing in vaudeville with his father. Davis was often hungry, never went to school, suffered racist abuse in the army, and endured constant humiliations as a touring entertainer. He tried to counter prejudice with his performances. His great talent was recognized during his nightclub appearances in the early 1950s, and he was propelled to national fame as both a singer and actor. But he always went on stage conscious of race, anticipating “what people out there may be feeling against me emotionally” and intending to “rob them of what they’re sitting there thinking: Negro.” The pressure of success led him to extravagant living and gambling at the same time that he became the object of abuse for partying with the white actress Ava Gardner and dating Kim Novak, a beautiful white starlet. The black press attacked him for insufficient “race consciousness” and the white press for breaking the race-sex taboo. By 1966 Davis had overcome a wealth of abuse and was doing well financially and personally—with a Swedish actress, May Britt, as his wife—but he never felt secure. “Things are really swinging for me now, but I can’t help thinking that I might wake up some morning and find myself out of vogue, kaput.” He’d had a recent experience when he was gripped with fear and thought to himself, “I’m going to die, because things are going too well.”13
* * *
In August 1966 Haley told Paul Reynolds that his marriage was failing but that he and Julie were trying to reconcile. “She always felt left out because attention was always on Alex,” observed a man who knew Julie at the time. Marital problems worsened Haley’s financial strain. Julie demanded money, though there is no indication that her demands were anything but reasonable, given that she was tending to two-year-old Cynthia. Traveling frequently to locations that he kept secret and living in hotels cost money that Haley did not have. He now wanted to move the family, intact, to California for a new start in the marriage.14
Haley’s tax problems were mounting. The IRS was hounding him with “cold adamance and actually humanly devastating collections,” he said, and was trying to obtain 100 percent of his income. In October 1966 Haley received a bill from the IRS for $4,577 for back taxes from 1963. (In 2015 dollars, that was about $32,800.) Haley told Reynolds that he was spending a lot of time fending off creditors. He owed Diners Club for accumulated travel expenses. Could Reynolds lend him $5,000, most of which would go to the IRS? “I have owed them so long,” Haley said. Reynolds worked with lawyers on Haley’s IRS problems and lent him the money.15
Haley complained that Doubleday should provide a larger advance. He had accepted a $5,000 advance in 1964, and in the ensuing years, he saw Doubleday give advances to other writers that were a hundred times larger. In the late 1960s publishers began paying much higher advances in general for books they believed would find large audiences. He felt that as a result of the critical acclaim for The Autobiography of Malcolm X he should receive more money. “I write now of my family. . . . I know I will make my family name, Haley, famed far beyond Malcolm X.” He knew “what I could have as a book, if I could go all out” and travel to Africa and other places to do research. “I make you a prediction, friend. I won’t come right out and call the name of the Prize. I just say to you: you just watch what we are going to win. Because just ain’t never been a book like this one.”16
To address his financial crisis in 1966, Haley signed on with the Colston Leigh agency, an established speakers’ bureau that represented many celebrities. Haley was steadily gaining fame as Malcolm X’s co-author. That fall he gave a lecture at Hamilton College titled “The Story Behind the Story of Malcolm X” for $300 (about $2,200 in 2015 dollars), and at the World Press Institute he delivered a talk titled “What the Negro Must Do for Himself,” for $400. In 1967 lectures became his main source of income.17
Also in the fall of 1966, Haley attended a garden party at the Westchester County home of DeWitt and Lila Wallace. Haley explained to Lila Wallace his family history project, and the next day she convened a meeting of editors at Reader’s Digest to hear more about the forthcoming book. Haley mesmerized the editors for three hours. At the end of the meeting, the Digest offered him an advance of $12,000, most of it to cover travel while he finished the book. The magazine received serial rights for “Before This Anger.” After having rejected the Digest’s support in 1964, he gladly returned to the fold.
Haley was determined to get to Africa to uncover the African part of his family story. He began going to the United Nations in Manhattan to look for Africans who might help him translate the words he had heard as a child in Henning. He stopped many Africans and repeated the words he had heard on the porch in Henning. After two weeks, he had stopped dozens of Africans, “each and every one of whom took a quick listen to me and then took off.” They dismissed him as some kind of American eccentric.18
Then, in September 1966, while participating in a seminar at Utica College, Haley described to a faculty member his attempt to get the African words translated. The professor told him that there was a student from the Gambia at nearby Hamilton College. On October 11, 1966, when Haley gave one of his first public lectures at Hamilton, he insisted on meeting the student, Ebou Manga. Haley later described him as short and very dark-skinned with short-cropped hair and “clear, frank” eyes. Manga was a solemn young man, a Muslim from the Wolof tribe, who “considers at length before he speaks.” In this meeting and another a few weeks later, Manga told Haley that Mandinka was not his native language but that he understood it. In Mandinka, he said, the word he heard as “Bolongo” meant “river” and “Kamby” was the Gambia River. He then translated all the other words that Haley remembered. Along the way, Manga told Haley something that excited him: “We have in The Gambia what they call ‘traditional historians,’ . . . oral historians. Senegal is trying to get all these historians to make a collective history.” Manga told him about “village books” written in Arabic and kept in each Gambian village that recorded its history. There is no evidence that, before his encounters with Ebou Manga, Haley had focused on the Gambia as the home of his African ancestor. His previous mention of his ancestor’s place of origin, made in the Philadelphia Bulletin, had been “the slave coast.” But the slave coast encompassed thousands of miles in West Africa.19
In November 1966 Haley went to Ireland to research his father’s roots. He traveled to the village of Carrickmacross in County Monaghan, fifty-five miles north of Dublin, to find relatives of his paternal great-grandfather James Jackson. Haley’s research had already established that a James Jackson had left that part of Ireland and arrived in Philadelphia in 1799. He inquired at both the Catholic and Protestant parishes. The Irish were cordial to Haley and far more concerned with his religious affiliation than his race. A local woman was a Jackson descendant, but she thought Haley’s ancestor came from a different line and suggested that he visit genealogical libraries in London. Haley went but made no discoveries there. Then he went to the Gambia High Commission offices in London to follow up on the information from Ebou Manga. Haley was in search of the African ancestor he now called “the Mandingo,” who he believed was put on a slave ship in 1766. In Virginia Haley had found a deed transferring “one Negro man slave named Toby”—the white man’s name the African had always objected to—from John Waller of Spotsylvania County to his brother William in 1768. With that information, Haley deduced that the Mandingo had crossed the Atlantic in 1766. At the commission offices, he was led to believe that in Bathurst (now Banjul), the largest city and the capital of the Gambia, he could find the name of the ship that had brought his African ancestor to America.20
* * *
By January 1967 Ken McCormick was getting worried about “Before This Anger,” which he wanted to publish in 1968. The book had now been under contract for two and a half years, and McCormick wanted to see copy. Reynolds told him that he thought the book would be finished by the end of 1967. Haley told Reynolds, “It’s my particular style (maybe I’m just not like other authors in this way) to spend 75% of my time gathering my material, and combing and cross-indexing it, until I feel the book is as I want it, in my head, and then I write, and very fast.” Haley remembered, erroneously, that he had turned in a chapter of Malcolm X about every two weeks. “Before This Anger” was not “going to get written, under my circumstances at present. It won’t get written until I can get enough money, at one time, to pay off sundry debt harassments [sic], . . . to be able to do the sustained concentrating on this book.”21
In early 1967 Haley’s money problems seemed to be getting the better of him. The IRS had found him negligent in paying his taxes in 1960, and it appears that from then on, his file was tagged for investigation for nonpayment. The fact was that after he left the Coast Guard, he did not earn enough to pay what he owed. In February 1967 Reynolds received an IRS order for the garnishment of Haley’s royalties for payment of back taxes, which Reynolds said he intended to ignore. He would pay to Haley what he had coming for Malcolm X. But Reynolds then found out that Haley had been signing additional book contracts, and he demanded to know the details. Haley had signed one with Grove Press for a biography of Melvin Belli, although it is not clear that he told Reynolds about this. Haley had also contracted with Viking Press for a children’s book. Reynolds worried about all these commitments and warned Haley against it—in an elliptical fashion. “I know your desperate problems. But one has to be candid in these matters and tell what has happened or one gets in real trouble when one discovers these things.”22
Haley was unrepentant. Under his current pressure, “I will entertain any honorable way to relieve it, at least that I interpret as honorable.” He again complained about the Doubleday contract for “Before This Anger,” which carried an advance of only $5,000 in August 1964 ($38,000 in 2015). That money was long gone. “Anytime a publisher advances $5,000, he cares but scantly for the book,” Haley said. The only other potential revenue sources were the paperback rights, and Doubleday was dragging its feet on selling those. “I will tell you something else they are not,” Haley wrote, “and that’s investing concern in a writer” destined to be in great demand. If Doubleday did not sell the paperback rights, then he would stop working on “Before This Anger” and start getting magazine assignments. “I will resume work on the book when I get—enough—working money. . . . I just happen to be that necessary evil, the writer. Nobody is going to get this book until I write it. And the book that is here, the Olympian chronicle, my family, my forebears, I am not going to half-write.”23
Reynolds replied that the Doubleday contract had been signed long before Haley was well known, and at a time when publishers were not paying the large advances that writers were now getting. “Let’s grant it was a mistake—my mistake if you want to,” but “when a publisher has a firm contract at one price it’s awful hard to make him pay more money. From his point of view, why should he?” Reynolds presented three possible solutions. They could get a big paperback contract, they could buy Doubleday out, or they could abandon “Before This Anger” and come up with a new, more lucrative, book idea. Reynolds then learned that Haley had signed a contract with William Morrow and Company for $12,500 to publish a collection of his interviews with celebrities. A Morrow editor had told another agent in Reynolds’s firm that Haley had sought the contract to get the money to finish “Before This Anger.” The writer was also working with James Baldwin on a script for a play about Malcolm X. Reynolds pleaded with Haley not to commit to anything else: “If you can say no to the small things and sort of keep in hiding, I think both of these books can be done this year, and this will come pretty near to solving your troubles.” Haley then told Reynolds he had also been talking to Elia Kazan about a film version of “Before This Anger,” for which Haley would write the screenplay. Reynolds answered that few nonfiction books were turned into movies, but because “Before This Anger” was uplifting, “it may make a picture.” Reynolds was desperate for Haley to keep first things first. “When can you promise me the first 10,000 words?” Not a word of the book had been written at this point, in the spring of 1967. Reynolds soon had an offer of $15,000 from Dell Publishing for the paperback rights to “Before This Anger.”24
* * *
In March 1967 Haley organized his first trip to Africa. George Sims gave him a list of African historians, and he was most impressed with the qualifications of Jan Vansina. Haley wrote to him, but the professor was doing fieldwork in the Congo, and the letter was delayed in reaching him. With the new focus on the Gambia that Ebou Manga had provided, Haley read up on the country in John Gunther’s Inside Africa. The Gambia had just won its independence from Britain in 1965. A tiny country geographically, a thin snake following the path of the Gambia River on both banks, it had a population of about three hundred thousand, most of whom were Muslim, and less than three hundred of whom were white. Few were literate, but there was a small black professional and civil-servant class. The country was dependent on a single crop—peanuts.25
Ebou Manga agreed to help Haley. His father, Alhaji Manga, a pharmacist who worked for the Gambian government, provided Haley with a list of Gambians who could assist in tracing his ancestor. On March 16 Haley wrote letters to the thirteen contacts. He described his book to an official in the office of the Gambia’s prime minister, explaining that Reader’s Digest, read by 24 million people in thirteen countries around the world, was going to condense the work. He added, “Recently America’s greatest cinema director [Kazan] has announced plans to film from the book a major motion picture. A sizeable portion will be filmed in The Gambia, employing many Gambians as actors. I think it’s safe to predict that by 1969, The Gambia will enjoy world recognition—and tourism.”26
Haley paid for Ebou to travel ahead of him and set up meetings with people in the Gambia who could help. Ebou formed what came to be called the Haley Committee, providing its members with information he had gotten from Haley as well as an idea of what Haley wanted to find. On April 9 Ebou and his father brought the Haley Committee together at the bar of the Atlantic Hotel in Bathurst. Haley met with six men, including the minister of local affairs and the secretary of the Gambia Workers Union. Ebou identified each man’s ethnicity; there were four different groups represented—Jola, Serahule, Fula, and Serere—but no Mandingo. One of the men lectured Haley: “You Negro Americans feel that you have been depersonalized. Well, so have we.” Haley in turn disapproved of what he saw as the Africans’ posturing. “They acted more British than do the British,” a shame, he thought, “when the African, being African, is such an utterly charming person.” He lamented “how much very vital time and psychic energy the Africans with any kind of position whatever waste acting like what they are not.” It was like how “many Negroes in America try to ape sundry white people.” He sounded a lot like his friend Malcolm X.27
In the lobby of the hotel, a member of the committee happened to see Alhaji Alieu Ebrima Cham Joof, a trade unionist, journalist, and radio broadcaster who had been a leader in the Gambian nationalist movement. Haley was introduced to Cham Joof, who was interested in Haley’s purpose for visiting. Cham Joof in turn introduced Haley to M. E. Jallow, K. O. Janneh, and A. B. Sallah, all of them Cham Joof’s colleagues in Gambian nationalism and trade unionism. These four men offered to help with Haley’s research and proved to be the most active in finding his ancestor. Haley told them that his forefather’s name was Kin-tay and that he believed he was taken from the Gambia in the late 1760s. He gave the committee pictures of his family. The Gambians thought that the name was significant because, they said, “our oldest villages tend to be named for those families which founded” them. They examined a map on which were marked two villages, Kinte-Kundeh and Kinte-Kundeh-Janneh-Ya. They explained about griots, to whom Ebou Manga had alluded in his first meeting with Haley. Griots functioned as oral historians; they told stories over and over about the history of villages, clans, and empires. What Haley needed was a griot of the Kinte clan, and the committee promised to see if they could find such a person. After five days Haley returned to the United States.28
* * *
Haley immediately wrote to Reynolds. “I am about to produce the single biggest book success of 1968. You watch! Can you imagine that in Africa, they were able to determine for me even the very village from which my 1760’s forbear [sic] was taken! And the history of that village can authentically be taken back to about 1600! Ain’t never been a book like this! We’re going to go hang a Pulitzer Prize copy on that Reynolds office hallway wall!” He had a letter from Jan Vansina, whose advice was similar to that of the Gambian men: look for a clan name, and if one was found, it probably still existed. Then a letter arrived from Cham Joof saying that a griot had been found. Haley should return and be prepared to travel up the Gambia River. Haley needed money to go back. In the second half of April, he delivered six lectures for Colston Leigh in ten days and made $3,200 ($22,300 in 2015).29
He and George Sims arrived in Bathurst on May 13 and met with the Haley Committee. A. B. Sallah had an employee named Demba Kinte, who came from the village of Juffure and had discovered Kebba Kanga Fofana, identified as the griot of the Kinte clan. Cham Joof and Sallah had met with Fofana, the seventy-two-year-old whom they described as shy and reticent but from whom they had elicited the needed information. Sallah told Haley that often the easiest way to establish a family connection was to examine facial features. His employee Demba Kinte resembled the photograph of Chicken George that Haley had given the Gambians. After talking with Fofana, Cham Joof and Sallah had calculated that a Kinte ancestor called Kunta could logically have disappeared in the 1760s. “You see, Mr. Haley,” Cham Joof said, “Kunta Kinte seems to be our man.” To go to the griot, Haley engaged a small steamboat that would transport a photographer; a radio producer; three musicians necessary for eliciting a performance from the griot; and Cham Joof, Jallow, Sims, and Haley. On May 17 the party sailed. Another party from the Haley committee traveled overland in a Land Rover.30
Thirty kilometers upriver, they came to tiny James Island, site of the oldest British fort in West Africa, where captured slaves were collected for shipment across the Atlantic. Haley explored a dungeon where slaves had been chained. They moved to the river’s north bank to a village called Albreda, where they were greeted by people from Juffure. “Asalakium Salaam,” they said to Haley. “The first thing that hit me was the intensity of their stares,” he later wrote. “Their eyes just raked me.” They walked a kilometer to Juffure, a collection of mud houses with thatched roofs, home to seventy adults. Suddenly the crowd parted and three old men approached. The one in the center, the oldest, wore a white robe and a white pillbox hat, and Haley knew instantly that this was the man he had come to see. The man was Kebba Kanga Fofana, the griot. He looked at Haley and spoke in a formal, reserved tone. Through an interpreter, he said, “You resemble the Kintes, especially the one called Mali Kinte, except that your light color is different.” Fofana pointed to a man in the group who was the son of Mali Kinte.31
Then Haley asked the interpreter to tell the people that he had come there “to find out who I am” and to learn of his ancestor Kinte. He passed around pictures of the Palmer and Haley family members in America. Then Fofana said, “Everybody should try to know where he came from—yourself, your father, your grandfather, your great-grandfather, your great-grand ancestors, all should want to know where they came from.” Fofana said that they heard through the ages that they had many relatives “in the white man’s country.” Then, as Haley recounted it, Fofana sat down and began to speak differently, as if he were reading from a scroll. His torso bent forward and the veins in his neck bulged. Haley later recorded in his notes that Fofana said that their forefathers had come from Mali, where they “conquered fire,” which meant they were blacksmiths.
Fofana recited many generations of the Kintes’ history. The family grew larger over the generations and was forced to spread to new areas and build new villages. In Juffure, Omoro Kinte had married Binta Kebbe, and they had four sons: Kunta, Lamin, Suwadu, and Madi.
Fofana descended from Lamin. The sons of Omoro suffered tragedy: one drowned and one died of sickness, and Kunta Kinte suffered a particularly tragic end.
About the time when the king’s soldier’s came,
He went away from his village
To get wood from the bush,
And he was never seen again.
Haley later said he heard no more because what Fofana said “meshed perfectly with what I’d heard on the front porch in Henning.” Haley asked the interpreters to explain to Fofana and the villagers that this was the story he had heard in America. Then the people formed a circle around him and, moving counterclockwise, began chanting softly, then loudly, and then softly again. Then, one after another, the mothers of the village stepped into the circle, thrust a baby into Haley’s arms for a long moment, and then snatched it back. This was a ritual, an anthropologist later explained to him, in which the women said, in effect, “Through this flesh which is us, we are you and you are us.” The photographer took pictures of Haley and his relatives, and then they all went to the village’s tiny mosque. The main message of the villager’s prayer that day was, “Praise be to Allah for one who has been long lost from us, whom Allah has returned.”
Haley returned to Bathurst overland, passing through the village called Kinte-Kundeh-Janneh-Ya. Villagers lined up to see Haley, now standing up in a Land Rover, and all of them were chanting something that he did not at first understand. Elders in white robes, maidens and mothers, naked children, all looked up at Haley, waving their arms and crying out together in English, “Meester Kinte! Meester Kinte!” He later said, “A sob hit me at about ankle level and just rolled up. . . . I began just shrieking, crying as I have never cried before or since in my life.”
Alex Haley would often say that this day in Juffure and Kinte Kundah Janneh-Ya was the “peak experience” of his life. His account of that day would be the main pivot in the book he would write, but it would also be a story that raised many doubts about whether it happened the way he told it.