She let her eyes travel from the casket to Alex Haley's brothers and sister, to his children and his first wife, to the elegant mourners. Alex Haley would have hated the fact that his shoes didn't fit, she thought to herself, Alex only wore shoes that fit like a glove. A sprig of rosebuds had been pinned to the lapel. The dead writer had been dressed in a stunning tailored suit. The mistress, in fact, attended the memorial service.īut what struck My Haley as most strange at the service was something only a wife would notice. On many levels, Alex Haley's death devastated his petite widow.īy the time of the memorial service, practically everyone in the family knew that Alex's mistress had been the person to summon Seattle paramedics when he suffered his fatal heart attack.

Like his ancestor Kunta Kinte, the cultural history of Alex Haley would be auctioned off to the highest bidder. What would shatter her most would be an estate auction, ordered by her husband's brother George, that would forever scatter the literary legacy of Alex Haley's personal manuscripts, notes and research materials. Or that she was soon to become so impoverished that she would be evicted from her California apartment and have to move to Phoenix, where she would share rent with her mother and brother. She could not know as she listened to the eulogies that after spending 18 years with Alex Haley, and-as she describes it-collaborating on many of his literary projects, that she would be portrayed in a complicated probate case as a gold digger who had once 'hijacked' her husband's unfinished books. Her body was tiny and lean, a testament to an ascetic daily routine of exercise, meditation and a diet consisting largely of baked potatoes and steamed root vegetables. She wore a tailored suit, sensible pumps and pearl stud earrings. She dressed as she usually dressed, in a style that was neither fashionable nor unfashionable. In contrast to the elegant women who'd come to pay their last respects, My Haley, the 44-year-old widow of Alex Haley, wore only a trace of makeup. On that winter day, few people noticed the little woman sitting in the front row near the African mahogany casket. It was a grand memorial service for the writer whose two books served as beacons of hope, pride and understanding to millions of Americans in the late 20th century.

They had come to mourn Alex Haley, the 70-year-old author of The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Roots, who had died of a heart attack on February 10, 1992. Dignitaries from Senegal and the Gambia were there. Attallah Shabazz, the daughter of Malcolm X, was there. Celebrities, ambassadors and politicians crowded into the Greenwood Christian Methodist Episcopal Church in Memphis, Tennessee.

Queen by alex haley