The Man Who Gave Us Our Season of Atonement

Under a sky cleansed by rain, on a morning that gleamed with almost blinding iridescence, the writer Alex Haley rose from racial historian Friday to racial icon.

A crowd of 1,500 visitors from across the United States stood in anticipation as a 13-foot-tall bronze statue of the author, the largest in the nation of any African American, was unveiled to hushed silence in Knoxville, Tenn.

It was only after a gold-tinted drape was pulled from the monument by L.A. sculptress Tina Allen that the racially mixed crowd broke into wild cheering preceded and followed by a harmony of oration fit for a king.

Haley, a shy, unassuming kind of guy, would have been amazed.

The author of “Roots,” who died in 1992, had in death achieved a position in history beyond his wildest dreams, that of a bronze giant in a seated, Lincolnesque pose with a gaze fixed on eternity.

Ex-Gov. Lamar Alexander and award-winning actor Lou Gossett Jr., who starred in the “Roots” television miniseries, joined an army of local celebrities to fix Haley’s place in history as a man of all people whose family odyssey from Africa to America elevated heritage to a grand new plane.

“He doesn’t just belong to us anymore,” former wife Nannie Haley said, staring up at the towering edifice. “He belongs to everyone now.”

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Even though he would have been stunned by the outpouring, Haley, who made L.A. his home for many years, would have understood its significance. He was, after all, an agent of cultural detente whose book, 12 years in the making, not only dramatized the anguish of a race, but also celebrated the importance of family.

This was never clearer than in Knoxville, a beautiful little city of 165,000 people where Haley lived, taught and wrote for 14 years. Blacks and whites, the public and the private sector, corporations and individuals, joined in raising almost $400,000 to make the statue possible.

The money included the building of Heritage Square on land where the eternal Haley now sits: book in hand, the classic “griot” or storyteller, his gaze fixed on the park, the lawn, the Great Smoky Mountains in the distance, and on a new brotherhood of races he, in a sense, helped create.

“We’re going into the 21st century as a family,” Tina Allen said, encapsulating the season of atonement that seemed to prevail, a season for which Haley was at least partially responsible.

“Roots” caused conversation and debate, and though at times the debate grew acrimonious, when people talk, they learn, and learning is what detente is all about. Haley knew that.

“In the end,” said Mayor Victor Ashe, “Alex taught us we were more alike than different and that we should celebrate our common connections.”

And celebrate they did for two days, and talk they did for two days; visitors from L.A. and New York and Washington and Chicago and Miami and Seattle and from Haley’s nearby hometown of Henning, where as a boy he listened to the storytellers in his family until he became one himself.

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I was here because I’d known Haley since his Coast Guard days and because we’d written together on many occasions. I knew him as a generous, complex, sensitive man whose vision of racial harmony was as large and imposing as the statue that now celebrates his life.

That isn’t to say, however, that Haley spent that life marching noisily for equality. His vision was an internal one that emerged in his work, not in a belligerence of attitude. Even after he had written “Roots,” he was unsure why it had become the doctrine of a race.

“I was just trying to write a book,” he said to me once, “not a bible.” Then he turned to his lifelong friend and assistant George Sims. “You never know when you start something just where it’s going to end.”

But while millions around the world were cheering Haley, a handful of critics were savaging him. “That hurt him,” Sims said as we sat together under Haley’s statue. “He said to me after that, ‘You know, George, I don’t think I’ll ever write again.’ And he never really did.”

I came to Knoxville as a friend but also as a reporter to acknowledge that in an age bereft of heroes, Alex Haley had rightly become one not just for a single race, but for all races for a long time to come.

The critics should see him now.

Al Martinez’s column runs on Tuesdays and Fridays.