ALEX HALEY: THE PLAYBOY INTERVIEWS

Edited with an Introduction by Murray Fisher
Ballantine Books (1993)

There is a point in Alex Haley's story about the search for his ancestral roots where I always begin to cry, quietly and without shame. It happened the first and only time I heard Alex Haley speak, in the 1970's, to an overflow, standing-room-only crowd of students at the Atlanta University complex. Haley was no stemwinding, finger-pointing orator like the men he is famous for interviewing: Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Instead, his voice flowed rich and graceful as a majestic river...the Mississippi River of his native Tennessee or, perhaps, the Kamby Bolongo of Kunta Kinte's native Gambia...gathering its force and power from the accumulated weight of its travels. More than two thousand students sat or stood mesmerized, almost breathless, for two hours while the emotional shivers ran like electric shocks back and forth across the auditorium. I stood in the back with tears running down my cheeks.

It happened to me again 20 years later, when I read Haley's poignant recounting of retracing Kunta Kinte's steps as reprinted in "Alex Haley: The Playboy Interviews."

I cry at the part when Haley goes to the village of Juffure in the African nation of Gambia and hears the revered griot, the keeper of the people's oral history, say in the midst of a long recitation on the history of the Kinte clan: "The eldest of these four sons, Kunta, went away from this village to chop wood--and he was never seen again." It was a mirror image of the story of Haley's great-great-great-great grandfather, the man who called himself Kin-tay, the man referred to by his family only as "the African," who had told his daughter that one day he had gone out of his village to find wood to make a drum and had been set upon by four men and kidnapped into slavery.

I cry because at the moment Alex Haley discovered his home village in Juffure, I and millions of other African-Americans were able to discover ours. At that moment, Africa ceased being the land where our people came from and became the land where our families came from. I cry for the life that I have lost, and for the history that I have regained. No matter that few, if any, other African-Americans could find enough family memories and census records and ships' logs to be able to retrace our steps, as Haley did. He did it for us. That is the legacy of the late Alex Haley. For all of us, there is a Juffure.

It is a remarkably powerful legacy for a writer who only produced two books and some magazine interviews. All of the things that made him famous are collected in "Alex Haley: The Playboy Interviews," including reprints of a number of the interviews themselves, an excerpt from "Roots," Haley's recounting of his family history from slavery to freedom, and a poignant account of Haley's memories of the late Malcolm X, with whom he collaborated to produce Malcolm's celebrated and best-selling autobiography.

The Playboy interviews, most conducted during the 1960's, are the centerpiece of this book. The subjects were the late jazz musician Miles Davis, Malcolm X, heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali (still identified at the time by his birth name of Cassius Clay), Martin Luther King, Jr., San Francisco attorney Melvin Belli, American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell, the late entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr., talk show host Johnny Carson, football star Jim Brown, and, much later, musician Quincy Jones. The interviews serve to remind us that Alex Haley was primarily a journalist, and a damn good one, too.

A good interviewer must be a little like a ninja assassin, slipping in quickly and slicing open the guts of his subject without calling undue attention to himself. Haley knew just when to probe a little further to get a fuller response, when to make a seamless bridge to a new subject, and when to be quiet and let folks talk. He did extensive research, he prepared himself for these interviews, and it shows. Living as we do in an era when interviewers want to chat along and think that their own views are all that we really want to hear, it is refreshing to see how it's really supposed to be done.

Haley was at his best in coolly picking apart George Lincoln Rockwell, the head of the violently racist, anti-Semitic American Nazi Party. Although I did not read the interview when it first appeared in Playboy in 1966, I remember that at the time it was legendary among Black Movement activists. In the interview's most famous passage, Rockwell told Haley early on, "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 calmly replied, "I've been called 'nigger' many times, Commander, but this is the first time I'm being paid for it. So you go right ahead." Haley let Rockwell stumble on, and ate him alive.

My favorite of these interviews was of Sammy Davis, Jr. Many of the more militant civil rights activists considered Davis to be either a non-supporter of Black causes or a traitor ("Uncle Tom" was the word used in the '60's). Davis had, after all, married a white woman (anathema to Black militants) and had once been caught grinning and hugging then-President Nixon in a widely-published photograph that truly embarrassed the race. But underneath Davis' minstrel surface, Haley probed and found a man with angry and deep-running views about American anti-Africanism. They produced this explosively memorable exchange:

HALEY: Among those advocating a revolutionary course are a number of racist groups dedicated to "getting Whitey" and sabotaging "the white power structure." How do you feel about their philosophy?

DAVIS: They're living in a dream world. ... You know what them cats should do if they're so mad? Go down to Mississippi and kill them cats that killed them three civil rights workers. Everybody knows who did it. Find out who bombed that church in Alabama: Wipe them out.

...

HALEY: Then you'd feel justified in taking the law into your own hands?

DAVIS: Yes--just as long as the law permits whites to kill Negroes, or "white Negro" civil rights workers, and get away with it. I'm for any kind of protest--including retaliatory violence against known killers who get off--as long as Negroes are denied the full rights that any other American enjoys.

HALEY: Wouldn't such acts of vengeance--even if the victims were guilty--set back the Negro cause by alienating millions of whites, as well as Negroes, who deplore all lawless violence?

DAVIS: I imagine millions of whites would be alienated, the same way millions of Negroes were alienated when their church was bombed and their kids were blown to bits. ... You see, baby, too many people don't want to face the terrible truth that violence begets violence. American Negroes have been on the receiving end of white violence for over 300 years... Unless white society acts to end that violence by punishing those who commit it, Negroes may run out of patience and take care of the job themselves. And because violence begets more violence, it could spark a bloodbath in which the innocent on both sides would suffer along with the guilty.

It was a chillingly prophetic vision of the Rodney King rebellions and of America of the 1990's.

Editor Murray Fisher, who assigned the first Playboy interview to Haley, has also reproduced a chapter from "Roots" here. It serves to remind us that Haley was not as comfortable as a fiction writer as he was as a storyteller or journalist; "Roots," like "Moby Dick" (another American epic novel to which it has sometimes been compared), is far more impressive by reputation than it is in the reading. The writing is often awkward and tends toward the melodramatic ("Bell and Kunta leaped up from the ground and went raging around the side of the house like two charging lions."; "When the sheriff's pistol butt crashed above his ear, Kunta's head seemed to explode as he crumpled to his knees."), and the use of misspelling to invoke dialect, as Haley does, ("He done drive you eve'ywhere you been for near 'bout dat long, Mass, don' all dat count for sump'n?") has never been a device that I am particularly fond of. But always, the emotion and the power of Haley's narrative forces itself through. He had a story to tell and he overcame all obstacles, even the deficiencies in his own writing style, to bring it to us. It is for this, above all, that Alex Haley will be remembered.