Question about the historical truth of 'Queen'

It's a blend but the balance seems to be fiction (which is how the book was marketed). I doubt the real Queen had that many adventures, and she's portrayed completely differently in ROOTS: THE NEXT GENERATIONS. In R:tnG she and her husband are much lower down the socioeconomic chain and she's a pipe smoking granny/country woman married to a man who disdains education.

Unlike most of the characters from ROOTS Alex Haley actually knew Queen very well. She lived to be very old, lived with her son (Alex's father) after her husband died, and Alex was married with kids of his own when she died. Haley also said he downplayed her mental illness/conflated it with her biracial identity. He also said casting the miniseries would be a huge problem because tantamount was that Queen could pass for white, and most biracial actresses look biracial.

The Jackson family of Alabama does acknowledge Haley's ancestry. (There were actually many children in the family, not just the one daughter from the miniseries.) When Haley died he had begun researching a sequel to ROOTS that took him to Ireland through the Jackson family; he said that his {white} relatives in Alabama and Tennessee and Michigan were a bit hesitant to publicly admit his relationship, but that in pubs in Ireland anybody named Jackson was eager to introduce him as "me cousin the famous American writer!"

This whole agruement about fact vs fiction or memor vs fiction is getting out of hand.

There is NO WAY an author nor a "regular" person can remember every conversation they may have had verbatum. Most people don't recall "words" themselves, they recall events.

Of course there will always be a little "fiction" in every story recouted. We do it in "real" life and writers do it in their works as well.

Are we to discount everything by holding up an unrealistis mirror that none of us would pass if we were asked to do the same?

Also, how could Mr Haley be able to recount a conversation that went on well before he was born? He was reaccounting the "event" itself NOT the "conversation".

Its the "story" that matters not the nit picky things.

As far as the "plagiarism" claims, I have read the book "Jubillee", whose author made the claim, long before I read Roots. There are no unique ideas or verbatim language in Roots that were lifted from Jubillee (good book by the way). since my grandfather was born in 1882, we heard many stories that he knew (and experienced although post slavery) and so I've always had an interest and studied this time period. While many people were surprised and shocked at the brutality of Roots, Roots was just one man 's story that played out similar to many other slaves. So of course anyone telling a story from this time period would have beatings, whippings, lynchings, castrations, maimings, rapes, rapes producing mixed children, and children being sold away from their parents. I'm not making light of the subject. I'm just saying it was common so any books written covering the time period and slavery will have similar situations.