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The
Shadowland of Dreams
by
Many
people cherish the fond dream of becoming a writer but not many are able to
see their dream come true. Alex Haley also wanted to be a writer and he succeeded.
Read the following for reasons of his success.
Many a young person tells me
he wants to be a writer. I always encourage such people, but I also explain
that there's a big difference between "being a writer" and writing. In most
cases these individuals are dreaming of wealth and fame, not the long hours
alone at a typewriter. "You've got to want to write," I say to them, "not
want to be a writer." The reality is that writing is a lonely, private and poor-paying affair.
For every writer kissed by fortune there are thousands more whose longing
is never requited. Even those who succeed often know long periods of neglect
and poverty. I did. When
I left a 20-year-career in the Coast Guard to become a
, I
had no prospects at all. What I did have was a friend in New York
City, George Sims, with whom I'd grown up in Henning, Tenn. George found me
my home, a cleaned-out storage room in the Greenwich Village apartment building
where he worked as superintendent. It
didn't even matter that it was cold and had no bathroom. I immediately
bought a used manual typewriter and felt like a genuine writer.
After a year or so, however, I still
hadn't gotten a break and began to doubt
myself. It was so hard to sell a story that I barely made enough to eat. But
I knew I wanted to write. I had dreamed about it for years. I wasn't going
to be one of those people who die wondering. What if? I would keep putting
my dream to the test － even though it meant living with uncertainty and fear
of failure. This is the Shadowland of hope, and anyone with a dream must learn
to live there.
Then one day I got a call that changed my life. It
wasn't an agent or editor
offering a big contract. It was the opposite － a kind of siren call tempting
me to give up my dream. On
the phone was an old acquaintance from the Coast Guard, now stationed in San
Francisco.
He had once lent me a few bucks and liked
to me about it. "When am I going to get that $15,
Alex?" he teased.
"Next time I make a sale." "I have a better idea," he said.
"We need a new public-information assistant
out here, and we're paying $6 000 a year. If you want it, you can have it." Six thousand a year! That was real money in 1960. I could get a nice apartment,
a used car, pay off debts and maybe save a little something. What's more,
I could write on the side. As the dollars were dancing in my head, something cleared my senses. From
deep inside a bull-headed resolution welled up. I had dreamed of
being a writer － full time. And that's what I was going to be.
"Thanks, but no," I heard myself saying. "I'm going to stick it out and write." Afterward, as I paced around my little room, I started to feel like a fool.
Reaching into my cupboard－an orange crate nailed to the wall － I pulled out
all that was there: two cans of sardines. Plunging my hands into my pockets,
I came up with 18 cents. I took the cans and coins and jammed them into a
crumpled paper bag. There, Alex, I said to myself. There's everything
you've made of yourself so far. I'm not sure I've ever felt so low. I wish I could say things started getting better right away. But they
didn't.
Thank goodness I had George to help me over the rough spots. Through him I met other struggling artists like Joe Delaney, a veteran painter
from Knoxville, Tenn. Often Joe lacked food money, so he'd visit a neighborhood
butcher who would give him big bones with morsels of meat and a grocer who
would hand him some wilted vegetables. That's all Joe needed to make down-home
soup. Another Village neighbor was a handsome young singer who ran a struggling
restaurant. Rumor had it that
if a customer ordered steak the singer would dash to a supermarket across
the street to buy one. His name was
. People like Delaney and Belafonte became role models for me. I learned that
you had to make sacrifices and live creatively to keep working at your dream.
That's what living in the Shadowland is all about. As I absorbed the lesson, I gradually began to sell my articles. I was writing
about what many people were talking about then: civil rights, black Americans
and Africa. Soon, like birds flying south, my thoughts were drawn back to
my childhood. In the silence of my room, I heard the voices of Grandma, Cousin
Georgia, Aunt Plus, Aunt Liz and Aunt Till as they told stories about our
family and slavery. These were stories that black Americans had tended to avoid before, and so
I mostly kept them to myself. But one day at lunch with editors of Reader's
Digest I told these stories of my grandmother and aunts and cousins; and I
said that I had a dream to trace my family's history to the first African
brought to these shores in chains. I left that lunch with a contract that
would help support my research and writing for nine years.  It was a long, slow climb out of the shadows. Yet in 1976, 17 years after
I left the Coast Guard, Roots was published. Instantly I had the kind
of fame and success that few writers ever experience. The shadows had turned
into dazzling limelight. For the first time I had money and open doors everywhere. The phone rang
all the time with new friends and new deals. I packed up and moved to Los
Angeles, where I could help in the making of the Roots TV mini-series.
It was a confusing, exhilarating time, and in a sense I was blinded by the
light of my success. Then one day, while unpacking, I came across a box filled with things I had
owned years before in the Village. Inside was a brown paper bag. I opened it, and there were two corroded sardine cans, a nickel, a dime and
three pennies. Suddenly the past came flooding in like a riptide. I could
picture myself once again huddled over the typewriter in that cold, bleak,
one-room apartment. And I said to myself, The things in this bag are
part of my roots too. I can't ever forget that. I sent them out to be framed in Lucite. I keep that clear plastic case where
I can see it every day. I can see it now above my office desk in Knoxville,
along with the Pulitzer Prize; a portrait of nine Emmys awarded the TV production
of Roots; and the Spingarn medal － the NAACP's highest honor. I'd
be hard pressed to say which means the most to me. But only one reminds
me of the courage and persistence it takes to stay the course in the Shadowland.
It's a lesson anyone with a dream should learn.
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