‘Roots’ author returns to slavery in second novel

Press, 8 December 1988, Page 42

‘Roots’ author returns to slavery in second novel

NZPA-Reuter Paris

Twelve years after “Roots” sent him to the top of the best-selling charts, Alex Haley is back on the bookstands with a novel he admits would have fitted into one chapter of his 1976 epic on negro slavery. “A Different Kind of Christmas,” to be published in the United States this month, returns to the subject of slavery but Haley, aged 67, refused to be categorised as a man with a mission. “Don’t label me as a writer with a message. I’m no message writer. I would say this is a piece of American history. I don’t ever sit down and think I’m going to try and convey a message. I’m looking for a story that might be gripping,” he said.

Haley was in Paris to promote his novel, which was published in French before the United States launch.

The book, written in four months as Haley sailed in a cargo steamer between Canada and Belgium, is likely to surprise readers who have come to see him as a champion of black rights around the world. For the hero of his book is a white man.

Set in 1855, the short novel tells the tale of a young southerner born into a rich family and

brought up to believe that blacks’ natural position in life is in slavery.

His eyes are opened to their brutal repression by liberal Yankees at college in the north and by Quakers who introduce him to the Underground Railroad, a movement that smuggled slaves out of their penury in the southern states.

The young man joins the Underground Railroad and is charged with organising a secret escape bid by slaves on his family’s plantation in North Carolina.

“This young white fellow is symbolic of the whites who helped the Underground Railroad ... there were hundreds like him,” said Haley, who now lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, after spending nine years in Hollywood. Separated from his wife, Haley lives alone, shuttling between a farm in Tennessee and his city flat in Knoxville.

“A Different Kind of Christmas” will be published in the United States just as a new television series based on “Roots” launches on network television.

“My, publisher called me and said could I write a book to coincide with the television series, so I took to the sea and wrote it in four months,” he said.

Haley, who was in the United States coastguard

before “Roots” shot him to fame, said he had always preferred to write in ships, and hitched a ride in a freighter from Montreal to Antwerp and back to write his new work.

“After ‘Roots,’ writing a book in a few months was great fun,” he said. “I did not need to research as I had it all in my head from ‘Roots’.”

Haley acknowledges the subject matter is the only thing his latest novel, at 200 pages, has in common with his first epic, but said he was working on another blockbuster. “This book is the opposite of ‘Roots.’ For ‘Roots’ I did months and months of research and it ranged over the whole issue of slavery. This book takes one small aspect of the same issue and develops it.”

He said the Underground Railroad was well documented in the United States but was almost unheard of in the rest of the world, like many other details of the struggle to end slavery.

"Men and women of the railroad were amazing heroes. Many of them died brutally when they were caught smuggling slaves out of the south,” he said. The book also pays tribute to the role played by Quakers in showing the evils of slavery. Haley’s next project is “Henning,” a loosely auto-

biographical work he said, was about the same length as “Roots,” based on life in his hometown of Henning, Tennessee. He said he hoped the work would dismiss the stereotyped idea that he could write only about slavery, although he acknowledged "Roots” had given him fame and money.

But Haley agreed “Roots” had turned him into “some kind of world spokesman on slavery” and that the main reason he had not written for 12 years was that his time was taken up with speaking engagements around the world.

“I seem to spend most of my life these days getting on and off planes,” he said.

Haley said his travelling showed him there was little to differentiate between the lot of blacks in the United States and those around the world. One statistic that depressed him, however, was that among collegeage blacks in the United States, more were in prison than in college. "That’s pretty grim,” said Haley. But he cited poor whites and American Indians as being worse off today than blacks. “If you think black people got problems, try the American Indians, try the poor whites, they’re in terrible shape,” he said.