About this book
Alex Haley, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Roots, tells about his great-great-grandfather who came to Alabama from Ireland, married a slave and then fathered a daughter—Haley’s grandmother, Queen.
The story begins in Ireland, where Haley’s white great-great-grandfather, James Jackson, Sr., is born. From there we travel with Jackson to Nashville, where he meets Andrew Jackson, the future president of the United States. The two men become business partners and James Jackson makes his fortune. He establishes his grand plantation, The Forks of Cypress, in Alabama, while Andrew ascends to the White House, and the rumblings that will explode into the Civil War gather force. James’s son, Jass Jackson, inherits the plantation just as the genteel, well-ordered antebellum world begins to crumble. His adolescent attraction to the beautiful and strongwilled slave named Easter blossoms into a powerful and lasting love, and from their passionate union comes Queen—the heroine of the tale, Alex Haley’s grandmother. This is history at its most compelling—from the Irish sod to the settlement of the South; from the Trail of Tears to the battlefield at Manassas; from the agonies of slavery to the tribulations of freedom—all rendered with the eye for telling detail and the sense of historical significance that readers have come to expect of Haley.
A miniseries adaptation called Alex Haley’s Queen and starring Halle Berry, Danny Glover, Tim Daly, Ann-Margret and Ossie Davis aired on CBS on February 14, 1993.
About Unknown Author
American writer and author of the popular 1970s book *Roots* which was adapted into a record setting TV mini-series.
"The giving and getting, the sense of belonging and contributing to something larger than yourself, to something that began before you were born and will go on after you die, can make it possible for you to accept life in a way that makes you wish the whole world could realize how easy it is to feel as you do, and wonder why they don’t. That’s what having roots—and writing Roots—has done for me. I pray that reading it—and then reaching out for their families to join in a search of their own—will do the same for everyone." ~ Alex Haley (A Candid Conversation With Murray Fisher, January 1977)
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