Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 1, 1991 TAG: 9103010217
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE NEW RIVER VALLEY BUREAU
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
"I don't think anyone could write as well as you about yesteryear," Haley told the Nikki Giovanni-led writers' group at Warm Hearth Village Retirement Community. "I think you have a greater literary value than you realize."
Haley, author of the best-selling "Roots: The Saga Of An American Family," is in his own words a "roving editor" for Reader's Digest. He promised to help get the Warm Hearth writers published.
"I'm particularly fond of older people," said Haley afterward, before his scheduled talk Thursday night on genealogy and "Roots" at Virginia Tech's Burruss Hall. "Looking at them [the Warm Hearth group], I was thinking, `What riches of family knowledge is in these people's heads.' "
Haley, 69, accompanied poet and Virginia Tech English professor Giovanni to Warm Hearth. Giovanni teaches a weekly writer's workshop of 14 people at the retirement community.
Haley, whose book "Roots" sold millions of copies and was made into a television miniseries, is on a lecture tour to raise money for college scholarships. Haley was brought to Virginia Tech as keynote speaker for Black History Month, said Geralyn Drayton, president of the Tech's Black Student Alliance.
"I figured he'd be a very interesting man to hear speak," Drayton said.
The folks at Warm Hearth might agree.
As Haley - ever the storyteller - talked informally to the writing group about his days growing up in a tiny Tennessee town, some 15 or 20 Warm Hearth residents listened from sofas and easy chairs, wearing their Sunday best. More walked up slowly as Haley talked, and leaned listening on canes and walkers.
There also was a smattering of younger writers and Warm Hearth staffers who had come to hear Haley, and some - such as Suzanne Langley - who stopped in for a minute and never left.
Langley, Warm Hearth's director of housing, has read some of the writer's articles and is interested in genealogy, she said. She called Haley's talk inspiring.
It inspired in the friendliest of ways. Haley - leaning over the back of a chair, like a neighbor chatting over the fence - spoke of honeysuckle vines and lightning bugs, of rocking chairs, porches and dipping snuff.
He talked of a great aunt back in Henning, Tenn., who could dip snuff and spit with deadly accuracy. "She could drop a lightning bug at 4 yards," Haley said.
And of Chicken George, infamous for his whiskey drinking, cursing and womanizing.
In those days, "I would go to school and I couldn't wait to get back home, particularly to my grandparents," Haley said. "I felt my grandfather was something like God. He could do anything he wanted to do. He didn't have to ask my grandmother anything."
Those were "the last days of innocence," Haley said afterward, before air-conditioning killed off front porches, when getting into trouble meant stomping on somebody's pumpkin patch.
At an afternoon news conference, he spoke nostalgically of the days when three generations often lived beneath a single roof.
In 1991, Haley said, many more Americans live alone. "We've gained so much, but God knows we've also lost."
Haley told his Warm Hearth listeners he had been a poor student. He said he began to write in the Coast Guard - mostly love letters for friends who needed some help with the ladies.
The ghost-written love letters got such good results, Haley said, that his shipmates began paying him for the letters, convincing him he could make a living with his pen.
"Then I started the long, long road that Nikki [Giovanni] knows, that every writer knows, of writing your heart out . . . until finally you start to sell things." Haley said he wrote almost daily for eight years before he had a sale.
He went on to become an interviewer for Playboy, and to write "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" with the black leader, who Haley said was shot to death before its publication.
The historical novel "Roots" was published in 1976.
Haley currently is at work on a book about Henning, where he grew up.
As Haley spoke, 82-year-old Frances Brown listened with a library copy of "Roots" in her lap.
"I'm glad I didn't see the movie, `Roots,' " she told Haley. "I'm enjoying it [the book] for the first time. . . . I can open it at any place and there's a story."
Brown, a 1931 University of Missouri journalism graduate who has free-lanced for The Washington Post and taught creative writing, said afterward that having Giovanni bring Haley to Warm Hearth was a treat.
"I think it was really great that she [Giovanni] was able to bring him out here to us, because very few of us will be able to go see him tonight" at Tech, Brown said.
by CNB