Professor Robert J. Norrell has held the Bernadotte Schmitt Chair of Excellence since 1998. He writes mainly about American race relations, including his most recent biography, ALEX HALEY: And the Books That Changed the Nation, which focuses on the rise to national celebrity and great literary influence of Haley. In this piece written exclusively for Bookreporter.com, Professor Norrell discusses the roots of autobiographical storytelling in African American culture --- it was one of the very first genres embraced --- and the earlier works that he believes had the greatest impact on Haley’s writing and his struggle to tell his own story.
In writing a biography of Alex Haley, ALEX HALEY: And the Books That Changed a Nation, I realized that essentially all of Haley’s writing was autobiographical, even when the subject was ostensibly another person, as was the case of THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X. Certainly Haley’s ROOTS was the ultimate autobiography in the way it traced the history of his family for seven generations. I learned that autobiography, or memoir, was the first genre embraced by African Americans, when escaped slaves first told their life experiences to abolitionist audiences in the North before the Civil War and then wrote them up for wider distribution of their story. It was a tradition that carried forward into the 20th century when Haley was struggling to tell his own story. Here are the autobiographical works that I believe shaped Haley’s telling of his own story.
1. Frederick Douglass became the most famous and influential African American of the 19th century through his lectures about his experience of slavery and then through his three autobiographies. His first, NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, appeared in 1845 and won him a wide following of readers, and then he updated his life in 1855 with MY BONDAGE AND MY FREEDOM. His third came in 1881, revised in 1892, and he called it THE LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. He established a practice of telling and re-telling his story to audiences that admired him and could not get enough of Douglass. Black school children and college students like Haley read Douglass’ story for inspiration and knowledge about the struggle through slavery and freedom. (W.E.B. Du Bois also wrote three autobiographies, and Maya Angelou published seven separate installments of her life, but none of these works appears to have influenced Haley.)
2. Booker T. Washington also published several accounts of his life, the most widely read being UP FROM SLAVERY. Washington recognized that black readers wanted to read about his life, and in 1900 he published an autobiography ghosted by a black writer and sold door-to-door to black homes. Washington was unhappy with the quality of the writing and publication, and immediately engaged a white writer to write another autobiography aimed at white audiences, which became UP FROM SLAVERY in 1901. In this book, Washington pulled his punches about the evil things whites were doing to blacks in the South during his life, but the story of his rise was so compelling that millions of people, especially those suffering through poverty and discrimination, loved the book. So did American philanthropists like Andrew Carnegie, who read it and began giving money to Washington’s school, Tuskegee Institute. Haley pointed to Washington’s thirst for education while he was still a slave in Virginia as evidence of blacks’ determination to improve their status, the impulse that always drove Haley, though he was himself a lousy student.
3. Some of the best and most influential works have been autobiographical fiction. Literary scholars have noted that works of autobiography and memoir are inherently acts of creation and not reliably objective. Richard Wright’s NATIVE SON was fiction and his BLACK BOY was autobiography, and each had a big impact on how Americans, including Alex Haley, understood the modern, urban black experience in far more realistic terms than any earlier writing had done. NATIVE SON helped to set the context for THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X. After Wright, there was at some level the expectation that black writers express anger about the black predicament. Haley was himself a genial, conflict-avoidant person, but he managed to insert feelings of anger in the black people he wrote about.
4. James Baldwin was a friend to Haley in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, before Haley became a noted journalist and Baldwin achieved his widest celebrity with THE FIRE NEXT TIME in 1963, a memoir that explored black anger just two years before THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X appeared. Baldwin’s use of his own life experience in FIRE made Haley’s impulse to write about his own life legitimate. They remained friends when they shared a high level of celebrity, including Baldwin’s ambitions, never finally realized, to write a play and movie script on the life of Malcolm.
5. Haley apparently never knew Ralph Ellison --- not known to be a warm and friendly fellow --- but INVISIBLE MAN had a huge impact on the understanding of the psyche of African-American men after that book appeared in 1951. Ellison’s masterwork was contextualized from his own experience and then taken to a height of existential truth. Haley often referred to his feelings of “invisibility” as he struggled to make it as a black writer in the 1950s and 1960s. It is ironic that once Haley became visible as a leading celebrity in American life in the 1970s, he suffered criticisms and condemnations about the truthfulness and originality of his writing that made him question the worth of pursuing success in America. He did not, however, live to include among his autobiographical writing an account of the costs of celebrity to him. It might have been a valuable contribution to black autobiography.
