Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [372]
After the war, with one or another editor accepting a story now or then, the U. S. Coast Guard’s hierarchy created for me a new rating—“journalist.” Writing every hour I could, I got published more; finally in 1959 at age thirty-seven, I’d been in the service for twenty years, making me eligible to retire, which I did, determined to try now for a new career as a full-time writer.
At first I sold some articles to men’s adventure magazines, mostly about historic maritime dramas, because I love the sea. Then Reader’s Digest began giving me assignments to write mostly biographical stories of people who’d had dramatic experiences or lived exciting lives.
Then, in 1962, I happened to record a conversation with famous jazz trumpeter Miles Davis that became the first of the “Playboy Interviews.” Among my subsequent interview subjects was the then-Nation of Islam spokesman Malcolm X. A publisher reading the interview asked for a book portraying his life. Malcolm X asked me to work with him as his collaborator, and I did. The next year was mostly spent intensively interviewing him, then the next year in actually writing The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which, as he had predicted, he hadn’t lived to read, for he was assassinated about two weeks after the manuscript was finished.
Soon, a magazine sent me on an assignment to London. Between appointments, utterly fascinated with a wealth of history everywhere, I missed scarcely a guided tour anywhere within London’s area during the next several days. Poking about one day in the British Museum, I found myself looking at something I’d heard of vaguely: the Rosetta Stone. I don’t know why, it just about entranced me. I got a book there in the museum library to learn more about it.
Discovered in the Nile delta, I learned, the stone’s face had chiseled into it three separate texts: one in known Greek characters, the second in a then-unknown set of characters, the third in the ancient hieroglyphics, which it had been assumed no one ever would be able to translate. But a French scholar, Jean Champollion, successively matched, character for character, both the unknown text and the hieroglyphics with the known Greek text, and he offered a thesis that the texts read the same. Essentially, he had cracked the mystery of the previously undeciphered hieroglyphics in which much of mankind’s earliest history was recorded.
The key that had unlocked a door into the past fascinated me. I seemed to feel it had some special personal significance, but I couldn’t imagine what. It was on a plane returning to the United States when an idea hit me. Using language chiseled into stone, the French scholar had deciphered a historic unknown by matching it with that which was known. That presented me a rough analogy: In the oral history that Grandma, Aunt Liz, Aunt Plus, Cousin Georgia, and the others had always told on the boyhood Henning front porch, I had an unknown quotient in those strange words or sounds passed on by the African. I got to thinking about them: “Kin-tay,” he had said, was his name. “Ko” he had called a guitar. “Kamby Bolongo” he had called a river in Virginia. They were mostly sharp, angular sounds, with k predominating. These sounds probably had undergone some changes across the generations of being passed down, yet unquestionably they represented phonetic snatches of whatever was the specific tongue spoken by my African ancestor who was a family legend. My plane from London was circling to land at New York with me wondering: What specific African tongue was it? Was there any way in the world that maybe I could find out?
CHAPTER 119
Now over thirty years later the sole surviving one of the old ladies who had talked the family narrative on the Henning front porch was the youngest among them, Cousin Georgia Anderson. Grandma was gone, and all of the others too. In her eighties now,