Many of you will remember Alex Haley’s Roots, the blockbuster novel and TV series of the late 1970s that followed seven generations of his family back through American slavery to a village in West Africa.
Less well known now is the follow-up, in which Haley traced five generations of another branch of his ancestry back to Ireland and a town in Co Monaghan.
Despite being born in the same town myself, this astounding fact had somehow escaped me until as recently as Wednesday. Then I met an old schoolfriend who a while ago visited a museum in Florence, Alabama, where the link is mentioned. And being astounded himself, he enlightened me.
As I now know, the founding patriarch in this line of the Haley family was one James Jackson (1782-1840), who had to leave Monaghan in a hurry circa 1800 but rose to be one of the richest men in Alabama as well as sitting in both houses of the state legislature.
Today he is perhaps less famous than Kunta Kinte or Chicken George, or the other black protagonists of Roots. But in Haley’s telling, at least, he is no less romantic. Here’s how Queen, the follow-up novel named for the author’s mixed-race grandmother, opens:
“On a cold and rainy April night, in a guarded garret somewhere in Dublin, James Jackson II, known as Jamie, swore a most sacred, solemn oath ...”
It is, as we learn, 1797, and insurrection is in the air. Although barely 15 years old, the hero is about to join the United Irishmen, an organisation in which his uncle Henry and an in-law named Oliver Bond are prominent.
“Yet Jamie was an unlikely revolutionary,” the book continues. “The eleventh of twelve children, he was born to comparative wealth, and grew up in an atmosphere of privilege and security. His father, James Jackson, owned many acres of land and a linen mill at Ballybay, near Carrickmacross, in County Monaghan.”
The father is loyal to the crown. Jamie, however, catches the republican spirit of the age, championed in Ulster by his fellow Presbyterians. When the rebellion fails, youth spares him the fate of many of his co-conspiracists, but outraged by the brutal treatment of the rebels, he quits Ireland for America.
Despite his early radicalism, Jackson becomes a plantation owner in Alabama. He wrestles with his conscience on such issues as slavery and the mistreatment of native Americans but wins, usually, and manages to live with the status quo.
A more pivotal figure in the family’s subsequent history is the next-generation James Jackson. He, we are told, falls in love with Easter, the daughter of one of the plantation’s enslaved couples.
Together they produce the beautiful Queen, who grows up being teased by the others for her “almost white” skin, while still herself a slave. At first uncertain, then proud, of her Irish heritage, she becomes the heroine of an 800-page epic that follows her adventures through the civil war, emancipation, and beyond.
Alex Haley was still working on the book when he died in 1993. It was finished at his suggestion by the Australian writer David Stevens, but published as Alex Haley’s Queen, in part to take advantage of the huge success of Roots. In the TV miniseries, Queen was played by Halle Berry.
History books record that the emigrant James Jackson became a close friend and associate of a future US president, Andrew Jackson, his namesake but no known relative. Their fates rose together, partly through land speculation.
At the height of his wealth in 1830, the Monaghan man built the Forks of Cypress: a Greek Revival mansion unique in Alabama for having a two-storey colonnade on all sides. It was burned down after a lightning strike in 1966 but the site is still listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
Another of his legacies is to US horse racing. He imported several influential stallions from Europe and has been called “the most successful breeder of thoroughbreds in United States”.
An 1845 match between one of Jackson’s horses, Peytona, and a mare from New Jersey, was billed as a battle between North and South and drew 100,000 spectators in New York. Jackson and Peytona won the $50,000 prize.
Haley’s treatment of the Irish wing of his family is generally sympathetic. The main characters are either opposed to slavery or tending that way. The book is, however, imaginative fiction, fleshed out from oral history.
In an afterword, Stevens admitted there was no documentary proof of the “most critical” relationship in the story: that Queen was the daughter of James Jackson III (DNA tests have since confirmed a link between the Haleys and an earlier Scottish ancestor). But she believed it. So did Jackson’s official descendants.
And so did Alex Haley, who in his novel had the ageing family patriarch still dreaming of youthful days in Monaghan: “Of Carrickmacross and Ballybay ... Of poteen and soda bread, and peat fires on misty mornings. Of rain-washed fields and white-washed cottages. Of lowering skies and breaking sunlight. Of croppies, hare hunts, and hurley.”
