Discovered by Napoleon’s army in the Nile Delta in 1799, the Rosetta Stone contained three parallel texts: one in Greek, one in Egyptian hieroglyphics, and the third in a previously unknown language. For many years, scholars around the world assumed that the three texts told three totally different stories and that the unrecognisable language and the hieroglyphic message would probably never be translated successfully.

Could he somehow, somewhere, find a way to make the words of his ancestors speak again. And did the secret lay further away, further back in time, than he had ever before let himself imagine beyond Tennessee, beyond colonial Virginia, and back to the African homeland of his distant ancestors. To tell the story of Will and Cynthia Palmer, their daughter Bertha, son-in-law Simon, and their restless, precocious grandson Alex, would he also have to tell the story of Kintay, the man his grandmother and her sisters called the African.

The thought disturbed and captivated Haley as he left the museum and made plans to return to the United States. My plane from London was circling to land at New York, he later recalled, with me wondering. What specific African tongue was it. Was there anyway in the world that may be I could find it.

A year earlier, in August 1964, Haley and his literary agent, Paul Reynolds, had first met with Kenneth McCormick, a senior editor at Doubleday, and his assistant Lisa Drew. The groups topic for discussion at lunch that afternoon was Haley’s still rather nebulous idea for a book length account of the gripping family history he had learned as child in Tennessee.

McCormick and Drew were immediately impressed, both by the novelty of Haley’s idea and the enthusiasm he brought to the project. The whole thing was very exciting, recalled Drew more than 25 years after his first encounter with Haley. To my knowledge, no black writer had ever traced his origins back through slavery.

Following the meeting, Doubleday signed Haley to write a book about his family’s triumph over slavery, advancing him $5,000 to cover his expenses researching and writing the book. The outline for the story was already there, Haley insisted, in his memories of his Grandmother Palmer’s front porch sermons.
But before this, This Anger Haley was calling the project at the time could not actually be written until he was able to finish the remaining archival research necessary to confirm and expands his grandmother’s recollections. Such research would, of course, take time: several months in addition to the extensive work that he already done. And it would also take money. At the time of Haley’s meeting with the editors from Doubleday, $5,000 seemed a generous sum more than adequate to cover the cost of the project. But that was all about the change.

Hardly a year later, mistakenly thinking that the research for the book was already nearing completion, Haley retreated to his home studio in Rome, New York, where he had written the bulk of The Autobiography of Malcolm X the previous year and where he now felt confident he could begin to pull together his new book. I write better there than anywhere else, be confided to an interviewer in 1966 not long after starting to write. It’s a very hospitable town. And the Jarvis Library is one of the finest small libraries I’ve seen anywhere.

At the time, Haley, was in fact so confident that he would soon be finished with the book that he was already outlining the plans for a number of other articles and a somewhat surprising excursion into the theatre. I have material for a musical comedy that I want to do, he told the same interviewer. But there were to be no musical comedies on Alex Haley’s horizon in the years that followed. The family saga for which he had contracted to Doubleday quickly began to get out of hand. It soon became apparent; Drew remembered that the book was evolving into a bigger project than he had originally conceived. With each of his unexpected appearances at the Doubleday offices, Haley brought some intriguing new discovery that promised both to enrich the contents of the book and further delay the date for its completion.

Alex would occasionally pop into town without giving us any notice, Drew recalled of the series of sudden, dramatic transitions that would characterize the evolution of the project and her own relationship with Haley. Ken was never able to make lunch on such short notice, and of course I could. The sessions between Haley and his editors soon became less and less frequent and the manuscript further and further behind schedule.

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