My Sunday with a gracious man who became a statue

by Jack Neely

How I came to be in his cabin in Norris that day had a lot to do with my friend Ron King, who came up with this idea to celebrate the bicentennial of the Bill of Rights. We'd consider the Constitution's first 10 amendments, finding an incident in Knoxville history that illustrated each. Then we'd get somebody to read it for a TV spot, some distinguished voice to tell the stories we'd written, illustrated, Ken Burns-style, with historical pictures.

The project didn't pay and had nothing to do with my full-time job editing a waiting-room magazine at Whittle, but scavenger hunts have always appealed to me, especially where Knoxville history is concerned. I don't even remember what we found. I wrote a few, Ron and Jennifer wrote a few. We had 10 scripts telling 10 stories about the 10 rights. We just needed someone with a good voice to read them for us, on tape.

None of us knew Alex Haley, the Pulitzer-winner, Malcolm X's ghostwriter, inspiration behind the most popular TV series in American history. But Ron contacted him, somehow, and asked him if he'd even consider this volunteer project.

Come on up, Haley said. Sunday morning at 11:00, Ron and I and radio journalist Jean Ash, who had a big radio-quality tape recorder, drove up to Norris in Ron's truck and arrived at Alex Haley's farm.

The young guard at the gate let us pass. The compound looked like a rustic resort, cabins around a pond where white swans were swimming, brightly painted harvesting tools which obviously hadn't been used lately.

We walked across the famous porch. I'd heard John Rice Irwin talk about this porch, the only place he'd ever seen Alex Haley, Lamar Alexander, and Grandpa Jones in one place. We walked inside, enveloped in the smell of green beans simmering in pork.

Three young women with Caribbean hair were just leaving. I figured we were penciled in from 11:00 to 11:15, 11:30 if we were lucky. The cook gave us some coffee, and we sat down, double-checking things, nervous about our scripts and what a famous author would think of them.

The front door opened and suddenly there he was in the room with us: a short and, I couldn't help noticing, odd-looking man. His skin seemed distended, overinflated, buoyant. Something about him and the slow, gentle way he moved around reminded me of Winnie the Pooh. I was surprised to learn later that he was 70 years old. He didn't look more than 50. He was businesslike as we shook hands, wanted to get right to work. I started to think we'd be out of there in 15 minutes, home by lunchtime. He wanted to read over our scripts.

Ron had printed his stuff out on an old dot-matrix printer. "I hope you don't mind," he said.

"It's my favorite," Haley said. He wasn't smiling, but he wasn't exactly sarcastic. I didn't understand, at first, his backwards way of talking, his habit of saying the opposite of what he meant, in tones too even to sound facetious. (He asked if the gatekeeper had given us any trouble and said he worried about the boy's "delicate feet"—then he mentioned that the kid wore a size 13 shoe.)

He sat there and read these scripts we'd been working on for several weeks, and said, mm-hm. Mm-hm. Then he got up and without comment disappeared into some other part of the house. Somebody said he'd gone to eat lunch.

We could wait, I figured. When Gertie the cook offered us lunch, I was expecting some white-bread sandwiches. I said nothing for me, thanks. But I didn't understand. She conducted us into a sunny dining room where a table was laid with five settings of crystal and silver and plates of country ham, greens, sweet potatoes. George, the old man who'd come in with Haley, was already sitting at one end and, I recall, already eating. I stood there a minute before I realized this elegant table was set for us. We sat down and sipped on some very sweet iced tea. George wasn't in a mood to talk to strangers and didn't volunteer much.

We had just gotten started eating the delicious meal when Alex Haley came in and sat at the head of the table just to my right. Someone passed him the ham, and he said, "I don't care much for this," and served himself a few thick slices.

He didn't seem especially interested in us and didn't expect us to be especially interested in him, either. Still, it was comfortable, somehow, one of the most pleasant meals I've had in years. It reminded me of the silent lunches I once ate with my grandfather—dinner, he always called it—after we'd been out working in the yard all morning. I felt like a kid. When Haley asked me to pass the ham, I was careful not to drop it.

But, like my grandfather, if you asked him questions, he'd usually answer them. Ron asked him why he liked to write on freighters. "Because you don't have to listen to 800 people dancing on the deck above you," he said.

I'd always wondered why Haley, raised in West Tennessee, where Roots is set, where Chicken George is buried, chose to settle here. Only because I thought I would regret it later if I didn't, I asked.

"I like East Tennessee better," he said. I waited for him to elaborate, but he did not. He was beginning to seem more like Buddha than Pooh.

Ron asked him what he was working on now. He mentioned the Queen project, said they were casting it for a TV miniseries. It concerned a young mulatto woman, he said, and asked us if we knew any good mulatto actresses. He stopped eating and looked at me, as if expecting I might name the star of his next TV series. I thought desperately, but couldn't come up with any names at all, probably couldn't recall my own without stuttering.

Then he said he was at work on an even bigger project, a novel about a white Appalachian family. "It should explode a lot of stereotypes," he said. Then he added, as if we might be skeptical, "It's an excellent book."

During the meal, large flats materialized, page proofs from Parade magazine, an essay Haley had written for the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and he went over them as we had dessert.

It wasn't until after the leisurely dinner that we got around to the project at hand. We took care of that relatively quickly, in another room of the house. Patiently he read our scripts into the microphone, redoing a few when he didn't get a name just right.

He seemed tired by it, and relieved it was over. More relaxed, he showed us around. He was especially proud of an antique organ he showed us, and an old pharmacist's desk, and a grandfather clock. But I couldn't help noticing that neither in here nor in the big common room, nor anywhere else I could see in this main house, were any books at all, not his, not anybody's. I was told this wasn't the house he lived in, he just did his entertaining here. Still, I wondered. You can spot Roots in the background bookshelves in any number of Southern Living model dens. Most people decorate with books, even if they don't actually read them. Alex Haley, author of one of America's all-time best-sellers, did not.

We'd been his guests for three or four hours. Before we left, I mentioned a magazine project I was working on at Whittle. Inspired by a scene in a Woody Allen movie, it was a short serial feature called "What Makes Live Worth Living." We got celebrities to give us their ideas, lists of favorite dishes, pieces of music, meterological phenomena. Haley seemed interested. Send him a letter, he said, grinning, and then "let my guilt work on me."

I left convinced I'd hear from him, and flattered myself with the notion that Alex Haley and I might get to be pals, that we might hang out down at Lucille's and talk about the Coast Guard, Malcolm X, jazz in the '40s.

I sent him that letter and was waiting to hear from him about what makes life worth living when, not three months later, I heard Alex Haley had died, in Seattle.

The worst of the attacks on his reputation as an author and as an honest man followed in short order, and continue today. That huge statue of him looking south from that hillside in Morningside Park looks exactly as I remember him, just as comfortable and just as mysterious as he seemed seated at the head of his dinner table in 1991. I still didn't know what to think about what I've read in the New York press. But the man who's there on the hillside forever looks honest to me.