Generous Mentor.

One of Alex Haley's `literary children' talks about how she received priceless guidance and preparation in her early role as one of Haley's researchers to become the author she is today.

In BIBR's July-August 2001 issue, Madam C.J. Walker biographer A'Lelia Bundles (who is also Walker's great-great-granddaughter) recalled the ground-breaking impact of Alex Haley's Roots on American popular culture when it was first published twenty-five years ago. In this issue, Bundles continues with more personal recollections of the generous mentor who always shared his knowledge, access and experience, and encouragement with younger black writers.

As Alex Haley described his fascination with Madam C.J. Walker, my great-great-grandmother, I listened eagerly, barely touching the butter-drenched scallops on the plate before me. "We envision a sweeping biographical novel and a miniseries," he said, his soothing bass voice flavored with the sweet sorghum tones of his Tennessee childhood. It was 1982, and I was a 29-year-old aspiring network news producer. Sharing the dinner table with me and the celebrated author of Roots were two longtime family friends: filmmaker Stanley Nelson (who had recently begun work on a PBS documentary about Madam Walker) and his mother, A'Lelia Ransom Nelson. The mother, too, of author Jill Nelson, Mrs. Nelson, who died earlier this year at age 82, was the daughter of Madam Walker's attorney and business partner, F.B. Ransom, and the godchild of Madam Walker's daughter, A'Lelia. A'Lelia Nelson was a librarian by training and profession, but she also served as president of the Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company for more than two decades.

Throughout the conversation that spring evening nearly twenty years ago, Alex called the names of the impressive group of actors, producers and writers he hoped to involve in the television movie. At first I was almost too awestruck to speak. Then, as he proposed hiring "seven or eight researchers," words rushed from my mouth: "Mr. Haley," I said, hoping not to sound too presumptuous in the presence of the first and only Pulitzer prizewinner I had ever met, "I wrote my master's paper about Madam Walker a few years ago, and I've already done a lot of research. I'd be happy to help in any way I can."

By the time we said good night on the sidewalk outside the popular Upper West Side New York haunt where we had dined, I was already imagining Madam Walker by Alex Haley displayed in libraries between Roots (his best-selling, award-winning 1976 novel that spawned the unprecedented but popular 1977 ABC-TV miniseries) and The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which Alex had also coauthored. Only days later the man whose research had transformed America's view of slavery asked me to become the Walker project's primary researcher. Within six weeks, I had persuaded my bosses to grant me a leave of absence from my job as a producer in NBC News' Atlanta bureau.

For many years I had dreamed of writing a biography about my great-great-grandmother, but during the six years since I had received my master's degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, there had been little research and writing time--except for a brief trip to Madam's Louisiana birthplace and occasional conversations with relatives and elderly former Walker Company employees. Hoping that Alex could duplicate the success he had had with Roots and trusting that he would keep his promise to complete the project "within three years," the trustees of the Walker estate granted him the rights to Madam's story. In 1982, at a time when the annual crop of new books by black authors was so meager it scarcely filled a shelf, we had every reason to believe that Alex's proven ability to sell books and his clout in Hollywood would give Madam maximum exposure.

With New York as my base for that summer, I spent delightful hours interviewing Harlem Renaissance survivors--blues singer Alberta Hunter, and poet and illustrator Richard Bruce Nugent, among them--then carefully traced the Walker women's paths to Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Chicago, St. Louis and Los Angeles, so that Alex would have every conceivable nugget of information he might need to write his account of my family. During our weekly long-distance telephone conversations and occasional visits, I shared my latest discoveries--a trove of Madam Walker's letters, a copy of the 1912 National Negro Business League speech in which she had confronted Booker T. Washington, early Walker Company advertisements on crumbling newsprint from early twentieth-century black newspapers.

That summer and throughout the next decade, Alex became a mentor and friend, encouraging my research and providing invaluable advice. As we teased each other about our common affliction as pack rats, he offered tips on organizing the documents and clippings I was collecting. One evening in New York, as he showed me the maze of scratched-out words and transposed paragraphs in his manuscript for a Parade magazine article, I discovered that self-editing and judicious revisions guarantee the best writing. On college campuses, as I watched this master storyteller mesmerize audiences, I learned the value of the pivotal, dramatic moment.

Whether Alex was savoring Mandarin orange souffle at Lion d'Or in Washington, D.C., or biting babyback ribs at Bar-B-Que Heaven in Indianapolis, he remained unpretentious. Always gracious in a favorite-uncle kind of way, he was skilled at neutralizing even the most contentious situation with humor. Perhaps because fame had come so late in his life, he wore it comfortably.

Busier than any ten people, he still found it difficult to say no to other commitments that interested him. Upon hearing my enthusiasm for a high school writers' contest I was judging, he volunteered to be the keynote speaker and to present the awards. On the night of the ceremony at Washington, D.C.'s historic Sumner School, he made a donation to double the prize money and patiently signed autographs for the students and their parents.

Over time, I became aware of dozens of other writers who would benefit from Alex's kindness. Screenwriter Tina Andrews, a recent recipient of the Writers Guild of America Award for her 1999 CBS-TV movie Sally Hemmings: An American Scandal, credits Alex with jumpstarting her stalled writing career in the early 1990s. When others feared the controversial aspects of the Hemmings saga, he urged her to continue her research. "A wider audience needs to know this story," he insisted. "We have to tell our own stories from our own perspective like the griots."

Attallah Shabazz, Malcolm X's eldest daughter and also Alex's goddaughter, recognized the extent of Alex's faith in her writing when she received a letter after her father's death requesting that she contribute the new foreword to a Ballantine/One World edition of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Years before, they had discussed the possibility of collaborating on his biography "to acknowledge our literary circle, our family of writers--my father to him and him to me" she later wrote.

As chief journalist for the U.S. Coast Guard in the 1950s, Alex had become accustomed to international travel, but the mega-success of Roots truly made him a citizen of the world. A guest of presidents and kings who invited him to state dinners and seaside estates, Alex was recognized on the streets of Bangkok, Paris and Dakar by admirers who had read or seen Roots. But it was on his 127-acre Norris, Tennessee farm where he seemed most content. Relaxed in his flannel shirts and corduroys, Alex delighted in hosting friends at weekend retreats, mixing the rich and humble, small-town folks and West Coast glitterati, Africans and Appalachian whites. Weekends at Norris often centered around celebrity visits from the likes of Quincy Jones, Oprah Winfrey and Brooke Shields. Entertainment ranged from the studied reverence of gospel singer Wintley Phipps to the spontaneity of Maya Angelou and Lou Gossett Jr. singing spicy blues to Glynn Turman's wailing harmonica. Egos, appropriately, were left at the gate, as guests roamed the meadow, strolled by the stream and feasted on catfish and hush puppies under the gazebo near Alex's 100-year-old farmhouse.

In April 1988, Alex and I assembled a guest list for a "Madam Walker Weekend" at the farm. From Hollywood, he invited casting director Reuben Cannon, Roots miniseries producer Stan Margulies, attorney Lou Blau and their families. For scholarly anchoring, I asked Alex to include Langston Hughes biographer Arnold Rampersad and Harlem Renaissance authority Bruce Kellner. Jackie Naipo, Alex's longtime assistant, and I shared a guest house with Lisa Drew, Alex's editor.

Alex had orchestrated an elaborate "pitch" meeting away from the usual Hollywood studio lot. With all those high-powered guests under the spell of his hospitality and charm, I was encouraged that Madam's story was finally on track--although it was now six years after our first meeting. A few weeks later editor Lisa Drew--who knew better than anyone Alex's penchant for missing deadlines from his long delay in delivering the Roots manuscript--ended a note to me with the words, "Let us all lean gently on Alex to move forward."

Later that year, historian Nathan I. Huggins--then director of Harvard University's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute and a mentor who was aware of the research I was doing--asked me to write a biography about Madam Walker for a young adult series he was editing on prominent African Americans. Mindful that Alex was, as he often told me, "getting ready to start on Madam" and hopeful that he would produce a blockbuster, I accepted the offer for this smaller project. Then, during the summer of 1990, when I was nearly finished with the first draft, Alex invited me to join him, novelist Joyce Carol Thomas and his boyhood friend and longtime researcher, George Sims, on a working cruise on a banana freighter from Long Beach, California to Ecuador.

It took only a few hours on board to understand why Alex loved the spell of the sea. With no television, no radio and no phone to distract me, I wrote furiously, turning out as many pages in ten days as I had in as many months. During the day, the seductive monotony of the wave-filled horizon lulled me into a trance that made for intense writing. At night, the womblike cradle of the sea rocked me into some of the most spectacular, pleasantly hallucinatory dreams of my life. The members of our floating writers colony assembled three times a day for meals along with the German captain and ventured in and out of each others' cabins when writer's block, fatigue or the need for human contact took over. By the time I lugged my Macintosh SE down the plank in Guayaquil, Ecuador, I had completed the final draft of Madam C. J. Walker: Entrepreneur (Chelsea House, 1991).

In late January 1992, eight months after the book's release, I was thrilled when Alex called to tell me that "our" Madam book was now part of a three-book deal he was negotiating with Ballantine/One World. After he completed the first two books--both sequels to Roots--Madam would be next, he assured me. But after a decade of promises, I don't think either of us really believed that.

Long past patient, but still trying to be respectful, I suggested to Alex that I write a draft of the book. "You can make whatever changes you like" I said. "Put my name underneath yours if you wish, but at least let me get the process started." Overwhelmed by deadline pressures, failing health and escalating financial debt known only to a few friends, Alex conceded that this probably was the only way the Walker book would be written.

A decade earlier when I had looked to him as a writing mentor, he had been the perfect guide. But now that I had written my own book, produced my own award-winning television pieces and developed my own storytelling techniques, I was no longer in need of a collaborator. Without question, I had benefited from my association with Alex. Certainly his interest in Madam was one of the factors that had made others pay attention to this almost forgotten early twentieth-century entrepreneur and political activist. We had often talked of promoting the book and miniseries as a team with Alex's celebrity and my personal connection as powerful calling cards. I still wanted that, but I had known for a long time that my family story would never be Alex's priority.

Two weeks later I awakened in a Los Angeles hotel room to a CNN report that Alex had died of a heart attack. The months afterward were painful for Alex's friends as his financial woes became public and legal squabbles over his assets erupted. To my dismay, the Madam Walker project became entangled in this mess.

That fall, when I read that Alex's Pulitzer Prize, his Spingarn Medal and some of his manuscripts had been auctioned off at his Tennessee farm, I was saddened. Then two years later, in a move that was personally painful to me as a member of the Walker family, a dispute arose with the Haley estate about whether I had the right to publish my own Walker biography. What had been a fruitful partnership with a generous mentor then metastasized into a protracted and difficult legal disagreement. Eventually, we were able to resolve the dispute with each party reserving the right to publish its own account of my great-great-grandmother's life. During the next few years, while I independently gathered new material about Madam Walker's personal and public life, the Haley estate shared the early research I had prepared for Alex with other authors, finally selecting novelist Tananarive Due, whose fictionalized work, The Black Rose, was published in June 2000 (see review in BIBR, July/August 2000 issue, page 19).

In the end, I still treasure my friendship with Alex, and I realize that he was a bridge to the shore I needed to reach in order to write On Her Oven Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker (Scribner, 2001). I will always be grateful to him for introducing me to my editor, Lisa Drew. And, though there were many years when I felt otherwise, I am now glad that he never completed his version of my great-great-grandmother's story--leaving me to take on the work I was always meant to do.