By Arial SABAR
Journal-Bulletin Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE -- For Howard Jones, it was an overnight success story that took a decade to happen.

When Oxford University Press published his book Mutiny on the Amistad in 1987, it bought a few ads in academic journals but did little else to promote it. The book sold modestly, mostly at colleges and law schools, and earned Jones a few invitations to small academic conferences.

Today, Oxford is flying Jones around the country on a tight schedule of appearances at bookstores, universities, historical societies, TV studios, even the Macy's department store in Manhattan.

Over the last two months, the book has sold five times as many copies as it had in the entire decade since its publication.

"It's the same book basically," Jones said last night at the Rhode Island Black Heritage Society, where he was on hand to sign copies.

"It's just that Spielberg . . ." he said, pausing to extend his forefinger and tap a reporter's notepad. "The finger of E.T."

The Midas touch Jones is referring to, of course, is a much newer Steven Spielberg film: Amistad, which took what many had discounted as a minor historical footnote and turned it into a national sensation dissected on Oprah.

The movie, released last month, tells the story of African captives who revolted aboard the Spanish slave ship La Amistad in 1839 and then, with the help of John Quincy Adams, won their freedom before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The screenwriter, David Franzoni, used Jones's book as a historical reference but based the main storyline on a different book, Black Mutiny, by William A. Owens.

Still, the film drenched Jones in Hollywood tinsel. The square-jawed University of Alabama history professor, a man accustomed to the cloistered world of faculty meetings and scholarly debates, had been thrust into the limelight for a book he had written 10 years earlier.

Jones, 57, first encountered the Amistad story while researching his dissertation at Indiana University in the 1970s. He was captivated.

"It grabbed me that here you have black people 20 years before the Civil War winning their freedom in the American court system on the basis of their being human beings," he said last night in an interview.

"And," he continued, "they made it back to Africa. It's the only time in history that we know of that that happened."

But he was busy teaching classes and working on a textbook on American foreign policy, so the book would have to wait.

About a decade later, he set out to tell the story.

Ignoring colleagues who described the incident as insignificant and lacking in historical documentation, he spent the next two years burying his nose in musty documents and microfilm. He combed through the archives of the Amistad Research Center at Dillard College in New Orleans [the center is now at Tulane University], traveled to Spain and England, and sifted through old newspapers.

The New York Times gave the book a mixed review in 1987, and Jones continued his day-to-day work of teaching classes and writing articles for academic journals.

The pace of his life changed last year as hype built around the Spielberg film.

In E-mail messages and phone calls, Jones and his publisher decided to release a revised paperback version of the book in December, on the eve of the film's release. Publishers of other books on the Amistad episode were doing the same.

The cover of Jones's book was changed from black and white to color, its cover photograph was enlarged, and its clunky academic-sounding subtitle was axed. The same man who made a cuddly household pet out of an Extra Terrestrial had made the Amistad story mainstream.

Jones's publisher, meanwhile, was suddenly giving him the royal treatment. He got a full-time publicist and a large travel budget, and his book was picked up by the Book-of-the-Month club and two other book clubs.

In two months, it sold 50,000 copies. February is booked solid with speaking appearances.

"It's one of those things that as a historian you dream about, but never think will happen," he said last night, as a couple of dozen people perused the new "Amistad Speaks" exhibit at the Black Heritage Society.

Jones knows that interest in the episode, and in his book, will diminish when Spielberg moves on to his next film.

But he credits the director for taking a risk on a subject that lacks the sexiness of, say, a teenage love story aboard a sinking cruiseliner.

Jones, who is white, says he hopes the film occasions introspection on the racial divisions that still haunt this country. He said that the Amistad story, in which blacks and whites cooperate in the pursuit of justice, should show people that racial differences are more often imagined than real.

Jones doesn't hide his enthusiasm for the movie, which he has seen four times now.

Even if the Southern intellectual is a little star-struck by his improbable good luck, he seems also to comprehend the fickleness of Hollywood fame.

Of the movie, he says, "I just hope it isn't swallowed up by the Titanic."

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