Alex Haley, a <i> Griot</i> for Modern Times

At this certain time, in this certain village, lived this certain person.

--Grandma Yaisa, telling a story to enthralled Mandinka children in “Roots,” by Alex Haley.

Perhaps it was because enormous commercial success came to him relatively late in his life. Perhaps it was because of his upbringing in Henning, Tenn.

Whatever the reason, humility was among “Roots” author Alex Haley’s greatest assets and most endearing qualities.

No doubt he savored the fame and wealth he gained from writing a best-selling book about his ancestors that was dubbed an epic and was transformed into a miniseries that became one of the most popular and celebrated television programs of all time.

Yet Haley, who died Monday, was not a man who sought pretense or affectation. Because of who he was, he had access to the highest circles. When you met him, however, he seemed to be such a natural guy. He was just folks.

Haley was an amazing storyteller not only in print but also in person. No wonder he was sought after as a lecturer and continually traveled on speaking engagements. Like the grandfather in “Avalon” detailing his youth for his grandchildren, and like his own grandmother in Henning, Haley could captivate listeners with stories not only about his ancestors in Africa but also with stories from his own childhood.

“For me, Alex was the modern-day equivalent of the griot, the man in the African village charged with handing down history from generation to generation,” said “Roots” producer Stan Margulies.

Returning to Africa, Haley found griots still surviving, and heard one of them describe tribe members that an astonished Haley realized were the same ancestors his grandmother had spoken of. “I sat as if I were carved of stone,” he wrote. “My blood seemed to have congealed. This man whose lifetime had been in this back-country African village had no way in the world to know that he had just echoed what I had heard all through my boyhood years on my grandma’s front porch in Henning. . . .”

The griot in Haley surfaced often. A story he once told me--an especially memorable one because it reflected Haley’s own values--concerned a cousin from his hometown. The cousin was a stuffy, unbearably arrogant, vain and pedantic college graduate who never went anywhere without his Phi Beta Kappa key hanging like a medallion from a chain around his neck.

Well, it seemed that Haley also had an elderly aunt in Henning, a simple, guileless woman with no formal education, but someone who instinctively got to the heart of matters. One day, as Haley told it (putting on a thick, Southern black dialect for emphasis), his aunt took a close look at the cousin’s Phi Beta Kappa key resting so prominently on his chest, and was genuinely puzzled.

“Very nice,” she said. “But what do it open?”

The question exposed the man for the phony, ostentatious boob he was, and Haley, an enemy of pomposity himself, made it clear that he approved of his aunt’s innocent skewering of his cousin. When he told the story, slowly and in dialect, he drew you into his history.

“His storytelling was his most memorable trait,” Margulies recalled this week. “David (“Roots” executive producer David Wolper) and I discovered it when we went to lunch with him for the first time. I don’t think David or I got off the edge of our chairs. He could make these stories come alive. You could see everybody. You could see the town. You knew everything you needed to know.”

Could Margulies recall one of those stories? He paused for a few seconds, and then responded with great enthusiasm.

“I’ll tell you a great Alex Haley story! He told it at someplace where he was being honored, and he told it about himself. It was his way of deflecting or at least sharing the honor.” The story was a parable.

“It seems,” said Margulies, “that all the animals from miles around gathered in Farmer Brown’s yard one morning. Everyone from the animal community was there, because there was an absolute miracle to be seen. The miracle was that there was a pig atop a three-tiered fence. Right on top. And all the animals gaped and admired and gasped and said, ‘We’ve never seen anything like that.’ And finally someone said to the pig, ‘Could you explain this?’

“And the pig said, ‘The first thing is, I didn’t get here by myself.’ ”

It was that Haley humility again, showing just how well-grounded he was, despite being praised, revered and inflated into a national icon.

“Alex and I talked about that after the avalanche of ‘Roots,’ ” Margulies said. “It (his temperament) came from all those years he worked and showed nothing for it except a mountain of rejection slips. So this overnight success, as always, had been preceded by hard work. He knew how ephemeral it was. So he stayed the same in the good times as the hard times.”

Margulies spent “hours, days, lots and lots of time” with Haley. “And the only way you could discern he was a celebrity was that you could not go into a restaurant with him or go down the street without people coming up and wanting to shake his hand. But never, with anything he ever did, did stardom rear its head.”

Nevertheless, “Roots” the miniseries conveyed on him a level of celebrity rarely bequeathed any author, for never before or since have a book and television movie been so tightly interwoven, both creatively and perceptually.

And perhaps never has a writer merged so completely with his creation, granting him a sort of immortality.

Words that Maya Angelou used to memorialize an angrier James Baldwin apply also to easy-speaking Alex Haley: “I hear his voice.”