A Quiet Thunder

I don’t know that I began thinking about Alex Haley the night thunder split the air directly over our house, shaking me awake at 4 in the morning.

It would make a better story that way, relating Haley with such an elemental force. And he was thunder in his way, shaking the nation into a new awareness of black history. But his was a quiet thunder.

I’m talking about the up-close Alex here, not about what he accomplished in a life that ended in turmoil. I’m talking about the man, not the icon, a friend for 40 years until the day he died.

It’s Black History Month, and he was an integral part of clarifying that history, of putting it into a literary perspective called “Roots” that no one since has matched. Perhaps no one ever will.

In the end he was battered by charges of plagiarism, a disappointing foray into episodic television and a nasty little effort to take away the special Pulitzer he’d been awarded, all of which saddened him beyond belief.

But even then he never lost his dignity and, once he understood what his book meant to so many, he loved to stand among the people and talk about how it all came about and how his own life had been back in Henning, Tenn.

“Sometimes,” he said to me on a flight from New York to L.A., “I wish I could just be the Alex Haley they think I am.”

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I was a reporter and he was the Coast Guard information officer in San Francisco when we met. It was my job to call him every morning to check on any overnight activities. It wasn’t long before we became friends.

His slow baritone drawl was like a song from the South at a time when I was young and quick and as one with the wind, riding the storm of a new career to destinations I hadn’t even considered. He was 40, I was 25.

Haley had a calming effect on me, a way of somehow quieting the gale that blew in my head. We admired each other and allowed each other into the deepest parts of our psyches, where hope and uncertainty dwelt side by side.

We began writing as a team in the late 1950s, just as the great social revolutions were stirring across America and black radicals like Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Stokely Carmichael, James Baldwin and Angela Davis were beginning to saw away at the chains of American racism.

Our freelance efforts began paying off when Haley retired from the Coast Guard, packaged up our manuscripts and headed for New York. Our last shared byline was a piece in “Boy’s Life” that I treasure beyond most of the mementos I’ve gathered over the years. We split $150.

Haley holed up in Greenwich Village and I think about that every time I read a phrase in the book that would sweep the world: “In a certain village, at a certain time, there lived a certain boy . . . “

His village, like the village of Kunta Kinte, had its own travail, and at one time Haley was down to 18 cents and two cans of sardines. When “Roots” exploded on the world, he framed the money and the sardine cans to remind him where his literary roots had been.

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Haley was staggered by the response to his book. Overnight he had become the Messiah to a people, linking their presence to the past, fleshing out their history, recalling their sorrow and chronicling their emergence. Other works had been done on the subject but nothing compared even faintly to this epic venture. Alex Haley, to his amazement, had written a Bible.

I profiled him at the height of his fame and watched as black people crowded around him at airports, in hotels and on the streets, hugging him in gratitude, sobbing with emotion, touching him, begging to carry his luggage, taking his picture, thrusting copies of “Roots” at him to sign.

“Never in my wildest imagination did I ever dream this would happen,” he said to me one night in New York. “I don’t know what’s expected of me anymore.” He shuddered at the sudden burden he had to bear, then said in a voice laced with wonder, “This is heavy, man . . . heavy.”

Not long after “Roots” had become an international bestseller, critics began to peck away at its authenticity like jackals scrambling to share a feast provided by the efforts of a lion.

They called Haley a liar and a thief and said his monumental celebration of a people was a hoax and a distortion. He settled a plagiarism suit out of court for $650,000, and later told me he did it “to get them off my back.”

He had enough on his back. What those who tore away at his chronicle of black history failed to realize was that it was more than a book. Haley had perceived the spirit of America’s black people. He had looked deep into his own soul and into the soul of those who had suffered and then triumphed. What emerged was something far more important than a book.

He died bearing both the burden of spiritual historian and the bickering of his detractors. My last contact with him was a telephone call three days before his death. He said, “I never thought it would be like this.”

That was both the essence of his thunder and the quiet nature of who he was, and they blended together for a moment in time to give millions of us a perspective we never had before. We owe Alex Haley for that. I owe him for just being a friend.

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Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com