Word: haleys
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About an hour later, Haley discovered what he wanted. "Suddenly I found myself looking down: Tom Murray, Occupation?blacksmith,' and beneath him, 'Irene, M?for Mulatto,' and their children. The youngest was Elizabeth, age six. And that really grabbed me. That was Aunt Liz. I used to sit on her front porch and play with her long gray hair. The experience galvanized me. Grandma's words became real. It wasn't that I had not believed her. You just didn't not believe Grandma. But there was something about the fact that what Grandma had been talking about was right...
...Haley's twelve years of research and writing on Roots had begun. In retrospect, Haley firmly believes it was more than his own perseverance that got the book finished. "However this sounds," he says, "it was one of those things that God in his infinite wisdom and in his time and way decided should happen. I feel I'm a conduit through which this is happening. It was just something that was meant to be. I say this because there were so many things that had to happen over which I had no control. And if any one thing hadn...
Success Model. Just as he forthrightly ponders the possibility of divine guidance, Haley is unabashedly thrilled with the riches that Roots has brought him. "It really startles me that the last thing I think of now is money." Though he plans only to buy a new stereo, a TV and a video-tape machine (to watch reruns of the series, among other things), Haley says, "The success in money terms is beyond imagination...
There is another reward too that pleases Haley: black children see him as a model for success. One stiff-braided little girl, brought with her class to meet Haley at a Los Angeles bookstore, said matter of factly, "I'm going to write a bigger book than you." Replied Haley: "Come on, honey...
...Alex Haley and the TV producers had the Lome Greene character farming cotton in Spotsylvania County, Va.; it should have been tobacco. Harold Cruse, author of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, observes: "When you see Leslie Uggams and her long polished nails, you just have to laugh." Although Cruse liked Roots, he thought "the ending was contrived, commercialized and romanticized. For one thing, under those conditions, you don't just tie up a plantation owner to a tree and then get into a wagon and casually drive away as if there weren't bloodhounds and night riders...