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- Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Max Reddick, a novelist, journalist, and presidential speechwriter, has spent his career struggling against the riptide of race in America. Now terminally ill, he has nothing left to lose. An expat for many years, Max returns to Europe one last time to settle an old debt with his estranged Dutch wife, Margrit, and to attend the Paris funeral of his friend, rival, and mentor Harry Ames. Among Harry's papers, Max uncovers explosive secret government documents outlining 'King Alfred', a plan to be implemented in the event of widespread racial unrest and aiming 'to terminate, once and for all, the Minority threat to the whole of the American society'. Realizing that Harry has been assassinated, Max must risk everything to get the documents to the one man who can help. Greeted as a masterpiece when it was published in 1967, The Man Who Cried I Am stakes out a range of experience rarely seen in American fiction: from the life of a Black GI to the ferment of postcolonial Africa to an insider's view of Washington politics in the era of segregation and the Civil Rights Movement. John A. Williams and his lost classic are overdue for rediscovery.
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5
‘Sixty years after it was first published, this shocking novel takes us on an astonishing black global journey that is historical but feels totally alive, energized and contemporary.’
— Bernardine Evaristo, author of Girl, Woman, Other
‘[A]n idiosyncratic, rancorous compound of roman à clef, sociocultural history, bildungsroman, and international thriller complete with an apocalyptic ending that patched disquietingly into our worst nightmares of what white America ultimately had in mind for us. Imagine a chronicle with the sweep, breadth, and momentum of Honoré de Balzac’s Lost Illusions morphing plausibly into one of Eric Ambler’s darker and more acerbic spy melodramas. Only with Black people – sad, mad, and fiercely articulate – in the foreground.’
— Gene Seymour, Bookforum
‘It is a blockbuster, a hydrogen bomb.... This is a book white people are not ready to read yet; neither are most black people.... But [it] is the milestone produced since Native Son. Besides which, and where I should begin, it is a damn beautifully written book.’
— Chester Himes, author of Rage in Harlem
‘Magnificent … obviously in the Baldwin and Ellison class.’
—John Fowles, author of The Magus
‘If The Man Who Cried I Am were a painting it would be done by Brueghel or Bosch. The madness and the dance is never-ending display of humanity trying to creep past inevitable Fate.’
— Walter Mosley, author of Devil in a Blue Dress
The Man Who Cried I Am
JOHN A. WILLIAMS
39To Lori40
Contents
FOREWORD
BY ISHMAEL REED
I used to watch The Today Show before leaving for high school. Dave Garroway was the host, and they had a mascot, a monkey called J. Fred Muggs. White authors appeared on the show regularly. I wrote a letter asking why no Black writers were ever booked. Shortly afterward, John A. Williams and two other Black writers appeared. This was the first I’d heard of these writers.
In 1962 in Buffalo, New York, I was hanging with a group of Black nerds, actors, and artists in the apartment of Phillip Wooby, a former classics professor at Howard University. I noticed an article from the New York Herald Tribune about how John A. Williams had been awarded the Prix de Rome only to have it rescinded. Williams fictionalizes the rejection in his most outstanding novel, The Man Who Cried I Am. “Dear Mr. Ames: I am writing to inform you that the American Lyceum of Letters has chosen you as the recipient of a Fellowship to the American Lykeion in Athens for the year June 1947–June 1948, subject to the approval of the American Lykeion in Athens.” The New York Herald Tribune article mentioned that one other Black writer had previously received the award. Casually Wooby said that it was him. He had received the Prix de Rome in March 1951. When I met John Williams, he was still obsessed over the slight. He blamed the rejection on the influence of Ralph Ellison. When I interviewed Ellison, he denied the charge. Williams and I became friends during my last summer in New York. It was 1969, and I had returned to New York after spending about two years teaching in Seattle and Berkeley. My partner, Carla Blank, and I 10were then living on one of New York’s historic blocks, whose residents at one time included Leon Trotsky. Our next-door neighbor was a writer who influenced me, W. H. Auden. Among the visitors to our apartment were filmmaker Brian De Palma and artists like Larry Rivers, Peter Bradley, Walter Bowart, Gerald Jackson, Algernon Miller, Joe Overstreet, and writers like Richard Brautigan, Cecil Brown, and Lionel Mitchell.
It became a gathering place for the Black downtown art and white counterculture scene. Our neighbors were always trying to bust us for smoking pot.
One night we threw a party attended by critic Addison Gayle, Jr., and John Williams. John and I hit it off. Soon afterward he picked me up for a trip to the Yale University Library where we found photos of writers of the Harlem Renaissance, including Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes. He said it was for a magazine called Amistad, which he and editor Charles F. Harris, who had recently joined Random House from Doubleday, were going to publish under the auspices of Random House.
John and Charles wanted me to play a role in Amistad and arranged a press conference I was supposed to attend from the West Coast, after moving to Oakland in 1969. I was a no-show. I got cold feet because I didn’t want to be considered a token. I’d seen tokens eaten alive in New York in a fierce competition among Black writers. This is why I turned down appearances on NBC, and on ABC where the late Hughes Rudd was a fan of mine. Amistad lasted only two issues because of disagreements between John and Charles. Neither one would tell me the nature of the dispute. Harris’s most significant triumphs were publishing Arthur Ashe and founding Amistad Press, which he sold to HarperCollins in 1999. 11Williams continued writing novels.
Williams’s mentor, Chester Himes, admonished Black writers to “think the unthinkable and say the unsayable.” This was Williams’s writing guide. Williams told the truth no matter at whose feet it landed.
In a letter to me, Williams expressed his despair at the reception he received for exposing Martin Luther King’s sloppy private life in The King God Didn’t Save: Reflections on the Life and Death of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1970). Tom Wicker and others had already referred to King’s promiscuity, but a different standard was applied to a Black writer addressing it. Like members of other ethnic groups, Blacks were expected to give the group’s icons a lot of slack.
Ken McCormick, the legendary Doubleday editor, told me that my nonfiction would be judged more harshly than my fiction. This rule applied to Williams’s The King God Didn’t Save. No critics noticed, however, that he had earlier put on display King’s immorality in The Man Who Cried I Am, through the character of Paul Durrell, based upon King. When the novel’s protagonist, Max Reddick, becomes the president’s speechwriter, Durrell and other Black leaders rely upon Reddick to connect them to the president (a thinly disguised JFK).
Paul, for four months you and every other so-called Negro leader have been wanting something from me. But I’ve quit. I’m not in the White House anymore. I can’t help you, and I hope I never have.”
“Brother—”
“Save that brother shit for the others, Paul,” Max said angrily.
“Why do you work so hard to get me to like you? Why have I got to be in your pew? The white boys are in your 12corner. Baby, what have you done? I don’t like you; I think you’re dangerous. The whole movement is tied to you and it can go right down the drain.
Readers were much quicker to notice the novel’s headline news: the existence of a contingency plan (called King Alfred) in the event of widespread racial unrest in America to muzzle Black intellectuals by threatening to release sensitive materials in government dossiers, among a number of other, more extreme measures to “terminate, once and for all, the Minority threat to the whole of the American society, and, indeed, the Free World.” Though critics still dismiss the King Alfred plan out of hand, the existence of a CIA plan to impose martial law and suspend the Constitution during a national emergency was verified in the Iran Contra hearings. And in his book F.B. Eyes (2015), William J. Maxwell exposes the FBI’s decades-long surveillance program targeting African American writers, including the placement of a dozen African American authors “on a dubiously legal ‘Custodial Detention’ list, an index of prominent dissidents subject to summary arrest and military confinement in case of national emergency.” That book still hasn’t been reviewed by The New York Times, nor has any organization like PEN America—which does good work when advocating for writers abroad—commented on the policing of Black writers by the government. Max Reddick moves through The Man Who Cried I Am with rectal problems, a metaphor for the daily humiliations and injustices endured by Black people, and more particularly by Black writers and intellectuals. Morphine helps to alleviate the pain. The book exposes the persecution of writers like Richard Wright and others who chose exile rather than remain in a country 13where, as Richard Wright relates from his own experience in Black Boy, a Black person had to lie to check a book out of the library. When I traveled to Chattanooga, the city of my birth, in 1956, I was barred entrance to the main library. From 1942 to 1960 the FBI closely followed Richard Wright’s personal and professional progress, targeting his passport and keeping him on the Security Index of major threats to the U.S. even after his expatriation. Wright was highly conscious of FBI surveillance and police power more generally, addressing both in his still-unpublished Paris novel, Island of Hallucination (1959), and in the pained but humorous poem “The FB Eye Blues” (1949). Two members of Joseph McCarthy’s staff, David Schine and Roy Cohn, conducted a much criticized tour of Europe in 1953, examining libraries of the United States Information Agency for books written by authors they deemed to be Communists or fellow travelers. Die Welt of Hamburg called them Schnüffler, or snoops. Williams creates a scene where the snoops interrogate Harry Ames/Richard Wright.
Hey, man, listen. Get right over here, can you? Tell you what’s going on: just got a call from Senator Braden’s number-one boy. That’s right. Is he a faggot, do you know? Anyway, he’s coming over to talk about some of my opinions I’ve put out over coffee at the cafe. He sounded real ominous, you know? After that business with that rotten magazine. I don’t want to talk to nobody unless I got a witness. Make a million dollars that way. Come on over and listen to some of this shit. Goddamn Government won’t let me alone, I tell you, Max, a man with pen and paper is dangerous, but don’t let him be black too—that’s a hundred times worse. Make it in fifteen? …”
Sipping the Scotch, Max had peeked out at Michael 14Sheldon. He was a handsome young man, polite, sure of himself. Max saw Harry’s eyes glittering with false cheeriness; Harry behaved just as a shark must behave when it has come across a choice morsel.
“In foreign countries, particularly those with strong attractions to communism,” Sheldon began, “we’d like all Americans to be careful in their criticisms. Now, you, Mr. Ames, have been rather harsh on us.”
“I have?” Harry asked innocently. “I don’t remember. Do you have an example?”
Sheldon pulled some cards from his pocket. “This is one of your quotes: ‘Senator Braden’s Committee has driven Americans into the far corners of fear.’ Another: ‘America ought to try communism, just once.’”
Harry said, “On the second one, I thought I said, if everything else fails, America ought to try communism of some kind because capitalism, hand in hand with the American dream, just doesn’t work; there are too many people deprived of their rights to vote and to work. That’s what I said.”
“But there were others,” Sheldon said, and he read them back with measured, self-confident cadence. The phrases sounded familiar to Max. Who at the cafe would turn Harry’s words over to the U.S. government?
Wright felt that he was hounded not only for his political views but also for his fierce self-reliance. In a letter of February 23, 1960, to his agent Paul Reynolds, he stated, “They have no political objection to me, but they hate the idea of an independent Negro living in a foreign country and saying what he likes. I’m about the only ‘uncontrolled’ Negro alive today, and I pay for it.”
Richard Wright was broke toward the end of his life. He received many rejection slips and even ostracism. He 15wasn’t allowed to live in London. His situation pertained to writers of his generation. Chester Himes, who lived in my house during the summer of 1981, also struggled to raise money toward the end of his life. When New York publishers no longer published them, they were done, yet the feminist line holds that before the rise of feminist writers, Black male writers had all of the glory.
Because of less expensive printing techniques, the internet, iPhone, Print-on-Demand, etc., Black writers are no longer as dependent as they once were upon New York publishers or prize committees that reward one token at a time. James Baldwin described the competition among Black writers as “sons slaying their fathers.” One could amend that to include daughters slaying their mothers. This still goes on in New York.
Williams wasn’t afraid to tackle the issue of mixed love, something that’s been hidden under the covers of the American Experience.
Both Harry Ames and Max Reddick are married to white women. Ames to Charlotte, an American, and Reddick to Margrit, a Dutch woman. They also have women on the side. Max sleeps with Charlotte and has various affairs, including one with an Italian woman in a wartime scene that is disturbingly graphic in its brutality. His sexual adventures warrant the joke contained in the character’s name, Red Dick.
The Z generation are race mixers and grew up watching commercials that included biracial families. They would be puzzled to learn that, at one time, such intimate intermingling was considered taboo (yet might come under scrutiny by a right-wing rearguard Supreme Court).
Though some ethnic groups risk extinction from “marrying out,” the relationship between Black men 16and white women still draws incendiary comments and prurient interest from some Blacks and whites. I’m sure that Baldwin’s editors persuaded him to get rid of Leona and Rufus. Their relationship ends in madness and suicide. Max says:
Dear Margrit. I had hoped you’d understand by now. There’s us and there’s them. Us means me because I’m black, and it means you because I love you, and it means all the people who want to feel as we do about each other, and all the people who’ve never had a chance to feel anything. Things are changing so fast. Things are getting very nasty and things happen more quickly and viciously and everyone says they couldn’t see them coming. I won’t lie; I see them coming. You remember St. Thomas and Puerto Rico. Those are the small things you are involved in every day if you’re a black man and your wife is white. They just put it to you that way; all they really want to do is to beat your ass good…. We hope for the law to protect us, but it doesn’t…. The other side has guns, Maggie, and power, everything serious killers should have to do their jobs. Without the law on my side, I become the law; my guns are the law, and the only law people in any nation live by is the law of force or the threat of force. Love, don’t do what a good asskickin’ can.
—
John often told me about how whites who harassed him and his wife, Lori, backed down when he threatened them with guns. He educated me about how Black writers endeared themselves. He said white readers craved novels from Blacks about incest, a comment that Diane Johnson repeated in The New York Times. She 17noted that “largely white audiences” would be thrilled by such novels. The salespeople must have been listening because there have been a series of books about incest. The worst was Push, in which both the Black mother and Black father commit incest.
He said that those with literary power would use Black surrogates to take down a Black writer of whom they disapproved. One took down Williams in The New York Times Book Review. The surrogate was being touted as the next token. He wrote one book and disappeared. One of his managers tried to pit me against him in a public forum, not realizing that I had seen tokens come and go. Williams wrote: “Negro men, they had a way of starting out with a bang, with the long, long dream, but ending with less than a whisper, so beaten were they simply because they had dared to dream in the first place.”
After two negative reviews, one by a Black surrogate, I was dropped by mainstream publishers. Fortunately, the late John O’Brien admired my work. He continued publishing my books at Dalkey Archive Press. Something that I and other Black writers have been commenting about for years was verified in 2022 in a study published online by Public Books. Using statistics, Howard Rambsy II and Kenton Rambsy demonstrate in “How the ‘New York Times’ Covers Black Writers” that the Times follows a one-at-a-time policy. The writers quote Williams: “Somehow, there was ‘only’ one Black writer praised in 1963; at least, so argued novelist John A. Williams. This solitary writer was James Baldwin, who had replaced Richard Wright, who had, in turn, replaced Langston Hughes. That succession, according to Williams, was because Black writers are only compared to each other. And this narrowness, warned Williams, 18‘confine[s] them to a literary ghetto from which only one Negro name at a time may emerge.’”
Though there were Black women who wrote as well as Toni Morrison, an excellent writer, Toni Morrison according to the statistics adduced in the study, received more coverage in The New York Times than Black writers regardless of gender. She edited the works of some of those women who wrote as well as she did: Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, and Lucille Clifton. Toni was a designated token due to her embedding herself in the publishing industry, where she had little power. During my last conversations with her, we discussed why her great novel Tar Baby was not a feminist favorite. Because in it, the women could be just as cruel as the men, and a Black man is everybody’s aphrodisiac.
According to the study, African and Caribbean women writers are replacing Black American women in the pages of The Times. But one could say that white and Black male writers, anyway, had it coming. The descriptions of women by Black and white male writers of Williams’s generation would not survive today’s feminist criticism. Women are regarded as though they were livestock inspected for sale on the market. Williams wrote: “It pained him to look at her figure. She wore a blue sweater which, no matter how loose it might have been, would have shown her breasts to tender and exciting advantage; they were always so white and fragile, so vulnerable. Her hips were fuller now. Time does do its work. And her swimmer’s legs, big-calved and just short of being too heavily ankled.” This is Margrit, Reddick’s enduring love. Charlotte, Harry Ames’s wife, wants to climb in bed with him. “Max tried to avoid looking at her. God, she was wholesome! Long legs, hips just right, breasts just large enough to get you on the verge of 19lockjaw, rosy mouth—damn you.” If #MeToo ever had truth and reconciliation forums, I’d be on trial with the rest of the guys.
But sometimes, the indictment of Black men from some women writers can be simplistic and over-the-top. On October 10, 2022, appearing on an MSNBC show, April Ryan was promoting her book, Black Women Will Save the World. She said her male counterparts were interested in “ego and power.” I wanted to go to the homeless encampment a few blocks from me to announce to the Black men shivering in forty degrees cold that they were “counterparts who were interested in ego and power.”
The Man Who Cried I Am is not for the squeamish. In addition to Reddick’s rectal cancer, his fiancée Lillian’s fatal hemorrhage, and the King Alfred plan, the novel describes a racially charged incident of cannibalism perpetrated by Moses Boatwright, a Black man with an M.A. degree in Philosophy from Harvard who becomes the monster feared by white society from the start. Interviewed by Reddick for a Harlem newspaper, he tells Reddick that his white victim tasted like yams and greasy pork: “To answer your question of some months ago, I took the heart and the genitals, for isn’t that what life’s all about, clawing the heart and balls out of the other guy?”
The Man Who Cried I Am is part roman à clef and travelogue, part whodunit and political thriller, and part horror movie and dystopian flick whose payoff is a plan to detain Black authors during a period when they were considered dangerous and not authors of self-help antiracist life-coaching books.
While living in the West, I have come in contact with Native American writers and was even admitted into a tribe in Alaska. They don’t discard their elders, which 20is how it’s done down here in California. For them, the elders are Tradition Bearers. This is also the custom among the Yoruba people of Nigeria. I asked Toyin Adewale, who, with my partner, Carla, produced our anthology Short Stories by 16 Nigerian Women, to call me by my first name, but she refused. She said that in Yoruba culture, we do not address those older than us in such terms.
Elders adapt the ancient stories of the tribe to address new situations. They are walking libraries. That’s how I view literary mavericks Chester Himes, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, and especially John A. Williams. They provide us with a map that shows us how to survive this racist hell, which can often be a real pain in the ass.
Ishmael Reed, Oakland, 2023
INTRODUCTION
BY MERVE EMRE
“Almost without fail, a novel written by a Negro is said to be one of anger, hatred, rage, or protest,” wrote John A. Williams in 1963. In his lifetime, he knew better than anyone perhaps the bigotry of American literary culture, how Black writers were permitted to speak for other Black people, and thus prohibited from speaking on behalf of humankind. Blunt in his opinions, modest in his conduct, droll in his speech, and smooth in his prose, he succeeded in drawing upon himself the suspicions of the establishment and the applause of his readers through more than twenty books. The Man Who Cried I Am was a best seller when Little, Brown and Company published it in 1967, after much rancorous debate over its form; Chester Himes declared the book “a blockbuster, a hydrogen bomb,” “a milestone in American literature, the only milestone (legitimate milestone) produced since Native Son.” But while nearly everyone has heard of Native Son, few readers are likely to recall The Man Who Cried I Am or place its author. His name is the name of tens of thousands of American men—men of any age, race, class, or creed. There is a peculiar irony in this, for the stories that Williams told, stories about freedom, oppression, desire, and self-determination, spoke to and for everyone, Himes proclaimed, “writer or layman, black or white.”
Born in Syracuse, New York, in 1925, Williams was the oldest child of John Henry and Ola Mae Williams. A family photograph taken when he was ten shows a thin, serious boy staring straight at the camera, with his two distracted sisters clowning on either side of him and 22their tolerant-looking parents sitting in the background. After an unremarkable adolescence, he enlisted in the still-segregated navy in 1943 and spent two years sailing around the South Pacific. The letters he wrote to his family back home were casual and polite: “I hope you all are well and in the best of spirits.” The poems he later wrote recollecting his service would be considerably more agitated. “I did not know myself,” confesses the speaker of “South Pacific,” who wanders among the palm groves and barbed beaches of the Solomon Islands. “I laughed at me, my thin / black shanks and bleached-by-coral hair, the ageless gait. / This was a home through which I passed / but did not know till I was gone.” Decades later, in an interview, he would report how he was almost killed when a group of American soldiers—“They were really pure crackers; there’s no other term for it,” he claimed—pressed a .45 to Williams’s head and threatened to pull the trigger. It became clear to him then that there were two wars being fought abroad. There was the battle between the Americans and the Axis powers, but, more familiar to him, there was the battle between the white soldiers and the Black ones.
When he returned home in 1946, he married and had two children. With the assistance of the G.I. Bill, he enrolled in Syracuse University, where he double majored in English and journalism and served as the president of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). After graduation, he worked, first in Syracuse, then in New York City, as a part-time copywriter while trying to launch his independent public relations company for Black businessmen. “Public relations, marketing, advertising, and promotion,” read the modest brown business card he handed to prospective clients. At night, in a hotel 23room he rented on 85th Street, he drafted his first novel, One for New York, about a young and aspiring writer, not unlike himself, and the obstacles he faced with white publishers. Williams knew what sold and why, which is why he was dismayed, but hardly shocked, when his editor secretly changed the title of his novel to The Angry Ones and published it in 1960, with a cover on which the head of a Black man, his eyes two vehement and narrow slits, loomed behind the blonde head and naked bust of a long-lashed, red-lipped woman. Near these two figures floated a bizarre and irrelevant snippet of text: “Trapped in an invisible cage.” Later he said he would not have approved the cover had he seen it—but he had seen neither it nor the edits that had transformed his novel into such bitter fare.
Despite his objections, The Angry Ones brought him acclaim and more assignments: reporting, essays, short stories, and his fantastically entertaining “Bop fables,” which rewrote biblical tales, Greek myths, and Shakespeare’s plays in the razor-sharp slang of New York’s jazz scene. In 1961, his second novel, Night Song, also touched by the rhythms of jazz, was released. The next year, he was awarded the prestigious Prix de Rome fellowship, which appointed him an artistic ambassador at the American Academy in Rome. To claim his award, he had to attend an in-person interview with the Academy’s director, Richard Kimball. Williams arrived wearing a cap and goatee and spoke passionately about social work, narcotics abuse, jazz, and interracial love, the topic of an article he had written for Cavalier called “Sex in Black and White.” Soon after, the Academy withdrew the fellowship. The board members refused to explain to Williams why they had changed their minds. Their silence seemed to confirm what he had written in 24The Angry Ones: that most of “the good, white moderate people of the North and South” were privately “anti-Negro,” for to be publicly anti-Negro was “no longer fashionable.” In an article for The Nugget, “We Regret to Inform You That…,” he explained, “The vast silence—the awful, condoning silence that surrounded the affair fits a groove worn. The rejection confirms my suspicions, not ever really dead, and makes my ‘paranoia’ real and therefore not paranoia at all. That is the sad thing, for I always work to lose it.”
One hears in this embrace of his paranoia neither mania nor agitation, but weariness, mingled notes of compromise and surrender. The Angry Black, with essays by James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Shirley Jackson, and Richard Wright, had a title that he claimed was “cast in cement.” There was little point in protesting it. Two years later, his U.K. publisher changed the title of his third novel, Sissie, to Journey Out of Anger, “which isn’t bad at all,” he judged, reassured perhaps by the fact that anger seemed to have been abandoned instead of embraced. Chasing another sort of compromise, a steadier paycheck than what his book advances promised, he accepted positions as the European correspondent for Ebony and Jet and the African correspondent for Newsweek. His reporting brought him to Egypt, Sudan, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Zaire, and Nigeria in the company of Chinua Achebe, James Meredith, and Malcolm X, whose revolutionary politics and revolutionary anger he warmed to, leaving behind the Black bourgeois uplift preached by the NAACP and the good liberals of America. Everything he lived in three decades—the war, the publishing business, the newspaper trade, the Prix de Rome scandal, New York, Paris, his travels across Africa, and the assassinations of the Black leaders he had 25written about—would make its way into his fourth novel, The Man Who Cried I Am.
The Man Who Cried I Am belongs to many genres. It is an existentialist novel, a social realist novel, a romance, a work of barely disguised reportage, and, in the end, a shockingly paranoid fiction. Above all, it is a novel of tremendous, uncompromising anxiety: the anxiety of a writer, struggling to escape the long shadow of his friend and competitor; the anxiety of a man luckless and self-sabotaging in love; the anxiety of an American whose skin color determines the possibilities and the limitations of every room he enters, every word he writes, every job he accepts, every relationship he pursues; and finally, the anxiety of a human being adrift in history, distrustful of his past and despairing of his future. But Max Reddick pretends to himself that he is simply bored, “bored with all of it, the predictability of wars, the behavior of statesmen, cabdrivers, most men, most women. Bored because writing books had become, finally, unexciting; bored because The Magazine too, and all the people connected with it, did their work and lived by formulae. He was bored with New Deals and Square Deals and New Frontiers and Great Societies.” When we meet him in a cafe in Amsterdam in the summer of 1964, drinking, bleeding, we know he is marked for death. Yet we do not wonder when or how he will die, but rather, how much of his existence he will be able to narrate before he does.
This existence starts later in life than one might imagine—not with the typical Dickensian flourish, “I was born,” but with the happy promise of making a life and a career for himself as a young writer. Max is twenty-four years old and his first book has just been published. We encounter him as he arrives at the Long Island summer 26house of the publisher who will introduce him to the great writer Harry Ames, one of the most attractive and irritating characters in American fiction, a talented, boastful, unstintingly charismatic, and duplicitous man. Part of the voyeuristic pleasure of reading The Man Who Cried I Am comes from matching the fictional characters to their real-life inspirations. There can be little doubt that Williams plucked the details of Harry Ames’s life from the biography of Richard Wright: his itinerant childhood, his flight to Chicago, his best-selling “social protest” novels, his troubled marriages, his communist sympathies, his expatriation in France, and, just before his death, his surveillance by the U.S. government. (When the manuscript was being vetted for publication, Little, Brown’s lawyers expressed concern that Wright’s estate would sue.) To Max Reddick, Williams bequeathed much of his own history and the mannerisms of his close friend Chester Himes. Careful readers will catch none too flattering glimpses of young James Baldwin (the broke and sulky Marion Dawes, who asks Ames for money in Paris then attacks him in print), Carl Van Vechten (Granville Bryant, the white critic who believes himself to have been the inspiration and the guide for the “Black Awakening”), William Faulkner (Burke McGalpin, the bourbon-drenched “Master of Southern Literature,” who must be dragged out of the Okefenokee Swamp), and Ernest Hemingway (“the bullfight man”). Slipping in and out of the novel are barely disguised figures that resemble Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and President John F. Kennedy. In a novel preoccupied with officials who watch and track the movements of others, the pleasure of voyeurism is mingled with discomfort. Who is the better spy, one wonders: the novelist or the government? 27
Darting swiftly among the seventeen years that separate Max’s present from his past, each of the four sections of the novel orbits an ever-widening world of literary and political activity. In New York, in the 1940s, Max struggles to make it as a crime reporter to marry the respectable, middle-class woman he loves and, tragically, loses; elsewhere, in considerably swankier parts of the city and its suburbs, Harry has a fellowship rescinded after his marriage to Charlotte, who is white. In Paris, where Harry and Charlotte live in the 1950s as celebrity expatriates, they are swarmed by French existentialists and American spies; Max, who builds his career as a novelist, arrives in Paris at the start of the civil rights movement, before returning to the U.S. to work as a reporter, covering school desegregations in the South. And across Africa in the 1960s, Max reports on the quiet disasters of decolonization, before coming home to observe the Kennedy administration’s feigned enthusiasm for racial equality. His reporting brings him dangerously close to uncovering the secrets and conspiracies of the pan-African independence movements with which Harry has become involved, and which presage his ultimate downfall.
Wherever we take off, and wherever we land, in whatever country or decade, The Man Who Cried I Am is an amazingly eventful novel, full of sex and schemes, seething with the highest hopes and the most crushing disappointments. In its pages there is no tranquility, no rest. Life is always, always happening, and, so long as it is, one must frantically wrest from it some battle-worn sense of self—the ability to cry, “I am,” however feeble or fleeting the cry may be. Max believes he feels the raw edge of living more acutely than most men, white or Black. “Why me?” he wonders. “Why am I the way 28I am? Mutant, freak, caprice, fluke.” And later: “Why remember more than most the vast laboring distance so filled with internecine horror and commonplace death, the gift of that raving bitch, evolution, nature, now made gentle with the title, Mother, and keep crying I Am?” Yet his restlessness and his honesty are precisely what make him, and not Harry Ames, the novel’s protagonist. His profound self-doubt is countered by Williams’s dynamic, assured narrative voice that never strays far from Max’s side. Even when it keeps the company of another character—Harry or Max’s ex-wife, Margrit—it remains marked by Max’s exclamations, his recriminations, his pleas.
His end, and the end of the novel, arrives rapidly in its fourth and final section. After Harry dies in Paris, Max receives a briefcase from his lover. It contains a series of leaked documents detailing King Alfred, an international plot “to terminate, once and for all, the Minority threat to the whole of the American society, and, indeed, the Free World.” These documents, which are reproduced in the novel as crude facsimiles, include the memo from the National Security Council rationalizing the Plan, a small map from the Department of the Interior highlighting the regions where the “Minority” would be detained, and a bullet-pointed timetable from the Secretary of Defense outlining how the “Minority” would be rounded up and subject to “vaporization techniques.” It makes for a curious and unsettling literary spectacle, the speed with which realism swerves into a paranoid tale of conspiracy and mass extermination. One begins to wonder: Could the gas chambers ever come to America? Yet it feels appropriate, proportionate even, as if it would have required a conspiracy this extreme, this outrageous, to end a life lived at the highest pitch of being. 29
The turn from realism to paranoia is not as sharp as we might imagine. Reading the novel again, one begins to appreciate how knowingly and subtly it is plotted; how Williams puts the Alliance Blanc, a secret global coalition determined to thwart Black power, and its sloppy management of top-secret documents, to shame. In the first draft of the novel that Williams submitted to his editor at Little, Brown, Harry Sions, he unveiled the King Alfred Plan in what Sions described as a “James Bondish note” that Harry Ames had written to Max explaining the government’s plot to exterminate Black Americans. The note’s melodramatics were “not quite convincing,” Sions wrote to Williams, and tonally out of step with the rest of the novel, which “up to now had been sharply realistic”: “The reader must feel that it damn well could be true and indeed well may come true.” Sions encouraged Williams to revise the end of the novel to include leaked top-secret government documents that have every appearance of being real. Such a plan “would create not one Watts but hundreds,” he imagined, referring to the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles, in which the arrests of two Black American brothers had incited six days of civic unrest against the Los Angeles Police Department and thirty-four deaths. It was a staggeringly ambitious plan for a novel’s reception: a total revolution in race relations.
At first, Williams balked at Sions’s suggestion, fearing that the incitation of riots would only lead to more aggressive persecution of Black Americans—something he believed his white editor did not appreciate. Yet he eventually came around to the idea that reading The Man Who Cried I Am could be revolutionary. Using his copywriting skills, he responded to his editor’s notes by designing six pages whose formatting imitated classified 30government documents with chilling accuracy. The Plan was written in the first-person plural and expressed itself through the flat, bloodless commands of a well-ordered hierarchy. Its explicit articulation did for his readers exactly what the silence of the American Academy had done for Williams: it made his paranoia—and the paranoia of his readers—feel real. By committing to writing the exact workings of systemic racism, the Plan offered its readers, beginning with Max, proof of the horrifying reality they had suspected all along: that their lives did not matter. As Williams wrote at the end of The Man Who Cried I Am, Max’s discovery of the Plan gave “form and face and projection” to American racism. “Before, all was nebulous; there were few names and places and the form was so all-pervading that it seemed formless. But now the truth literally had been placed in Max’s lap.”
For Williams, the fictional Plan got at the truth of what was happening across the U.S. in 1967—the summer disturbances in Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit, Newark, Milwaukee, Tampa; the surveillance of Black leaders by the federal government; the assaults on Black men and women by the police. Just as Max sensed that the Plan could have the radical potential to unite Black Americans against the white institutions of politics, so did Williams believe that the uncanny sense of recognition compelled by the Plan’s form could influence the world outside the novel. As Little, Brown prepared to publish The Man in the summer of 1967, they released the Plan to two thousand booksellers and jobbers as a marketing ploy. Ensconced in a manila folder labeled “CLASSIFICATION: TOP SECRET,” it was framed by a bright purple sidebar that identified it as from the novel “to be published on October 25, 1967.” For Williams, the mention of the author, the title, and the 31publishing house’s insignia threatened to diminish the shock of recognition, or misrecognition, that he wanted his readers to experience. In early October 1967, he asked Little, Brown to place the Plan in the New York Times with no explanation of what it was or how it had come to the newspaper’s attention. Williams was “enormously distressed” when Little, Brown balked, telling publicity director Robert Fetridge that he would have it published at his own expense. “That is exactly how much confidence I have in the section as a publicity piece. And I don’t believe it is cheap publicity,” he wrote, adding, “The concentration camps do exist. I have since learned that the Federal government does have such a contingency plan. We know that the Army and National Guard as well as the local police are undergoing riot training. What in the hell is cheap about the truth?”
In mid-October, Williams asked Little, Brown for one hundred clean copies of the Plan, and began leaving them in subway cars all over Manhattan. He also planned, with the help of his sales manager, Patrick McCaleb, to mail copies to contacts at the United Nations—first to representatives of the Soviet bloc nations, and then, once the Soviets started to talk, to the embassies of the nations mentioned in The Man Who Cried I Am. Once U.S. foreign relations had descended into a state of chaos—forty-eight hours later, Williams estimated in a timetable he put together for McCaleb—he wanted “copies [to] go in some mysterious fashion to Dick Gregory, James Meredith, Claude McKissick, and Stokely Carmichael,” the Black activists who Williams believed would “make the most noise” about the Plan. The Plan had to look like it had no point of origin. “Secrecy can be power, and there is power in secrecy,” Williams wrote to Sions. 32
According to Williams’s friend, the journalist Herbert Boyd, “The ploy worked so well that soon after Black folks all over New York City were talking about ‘the plan’—a fictitious plot that many thought was true.” As photocopies circulated, readers themselves edited the Plan’s visual presentation to enhance its textual authority. Portions of the Plan were redacted; the map was enhanced to include color-coordinated keys and city names where the concentration camps were located; patterned code names like “REX-84,” short for “Readiness Exercise 84,” were affixed to the documents. (In Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, Oliver North, Ronald Reagan, and the National Security Council create “REX-84 Bravo,” a government “readiness exercise” designed to test counterterrorism measures and an unwitting homage to Williams.) The Plan made its way north to Boston and west to Chicago, where members of Black activist groups, unsure whether the Plan was fiction or reality, took turns reading it at meetings, sometimes aloud, and interpreting how its designs reflected the entire history of Black oppression in America. According to the Black Topographical Society of Chicago, the Plan was key to understanding everything from racist hiring practices to how “super highways such as the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago were always routed through black ghettoes to facilitate eventual military operations against those communities.”
In 1970, Clive DePatten, a nineteen-year-old Chicagoan who had joined the Black Panther Party after a violent altercation with the police, appeared in front of the House Internal Security Committee to testify to the existence of a plan to exterminate Black people he had read about in a newspaper. The congressman let him finish before informing him that the FBI had already 33investigated the King Alfred plan in 1969 and “found it to be lifted from a novel, The Man Who Cried I Am, by John A. Williams, a black himself.” Surprised, DePatten nevertheless insisted on its truth. “Even if it actually is fictional, events in the black community are paralleling those set out in the King Alfred Plan,” he testified. The urban renewal projects of the 1950s and 1960s had corralled Black Americans “into the ghettoes,” he argued, where they were as vulnerable to state brutality as interned Japanese Americans during World War II or Jewish prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. Schools remained segregated. Housing was squalid. The police were everywhere. The government was dismissive of DePatten’s concerns, as they were of all the individuals and organizations that testified to the truth of the Plan—ex-army spies, who claimed that the Plan was an open secret; the ACLU, which claimed that the Reverend Jesse Jackson was under surveillance by the government. For many, the silence of the government was all they needed to validate the Plan’s claims. “It is a plan of fear,” the Iowa Republican William J. Scherle said at DePatten’s testimony. “If you want to believe it, sure, it will scare the hell out of you.”
The Man Who Cried I Am was a best seller and a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. It was translated into Dutch and French and went through six printings before it faded from the public eye, in and out of print in the three decades prior to Williams’s death in 2015. And yet, read today, the Plan provokes a glimmer of recognition, a reality masquerading as paranoia. Jacksonville, Ferguson, Beavercreek, Waller County, Baltimore, and Staten Island are not named on the maps or timetables of Williams’s designs, but the deaths of young Black men and women at the hands of the state are the legacy of 34the same systemic oppression to which the Plan and its readers testified: unequal access to schools and housing and healthcare and political representation; unequal targeting by a militarized police force. The truth of the Plan continues to be America’s truth. All the more reason why we should read Williams’s novel and why we should let it scare the hell out of us.
Merve Emre, New Haven, 202335
The Man Who Cried I Am
I
I.
Amsterdam
It was a late afternoon in the middle of May and Max Reddick was sitting in an outdoor cafe on the Leidseplein toying with a Pernod. The factories and shops were closing and traffic streamed from Leidsestraat onto the Plein. There were many bicycle riders. Through eyes that had been half glazed over for several days with alcohol, Librium and morphine, Max looked appreciatively at the female cyclists. The men were so average. He quickly dismissed them. The girls were something else again, big-legged and big-buttocked. (Very much like African women, Max thought.) They pedaled past, their chins held high, their knees promising for fractions of seconds only, a flash of white above the stockingtops and then, the view imminent, the knees rushed up and obscured all view. Once in a while Max would see a girl pedaling saucily, not caring if her knees blocked out the sights above or not. Max would think: Go, baby!
The cafe was empty. That was a good sign. It meant that the people Max used to know in Amsterdam, the painters, writers and sculptors, the composers and song-and-dance men who were the year-round Black Peters for the Dutch, the jazzmen, were working well. They would be out later and drink Genever or beer until they became high, wanted to talk about their work or go make love. Maybe they would go up to the Kring, if they were members or honored guests, and play four-ball billiards while eating fresh herring. It was time for the fresh herring, the green herring. Max glanced at the sky. God! he thought. It was like a clear high-noon sky in New York. No night 43would appear here until nine, but daybreak would come galloping up at close to three in the morning. He finished his Pernod and twisted to find the waiter, raising his hand at the same time. He felt something squish as he moved, and the meaning of the feeling caught at his voice. “Ober,” he said, then more loudly, “Ober.” The waiter, clad in a red jacket, black tie and black pants looked up with a smile. This was a new face, a new American. A little older than many others, and a sick look about him at that! Painter, writer, sculptor, jazz musician, dancer...?
“Pernod,” Max said. The waiter nodded and retreated to the bar. Max felt a sharp, gouging pain and he gripped his glass tightly. Water came to his eyes and he felt sweat pop out on his forehead. “Goddamn,” he whispered. When the pain subsided, he rose and went to the men’s room inside the cafe.
When he came out he noticed that the fresh Pernod was already on his table and he said “Dank U” to the waiter. That phrase he remembered, as he remembered others in French, German, Spanish, Italian, but he could barely put a sentence together in them. He sat down again, glancing at his watch. Where was she?
She had told him in their exchange of polite letters that she had returned to the gallery. If that was so, she should be passing the café at any moment, passing with that long, springy stride, so strange because she was small and not thin, passing with her hair billowing back over her shoulders. He had seen her pass many, many times. Before. Before, when he had sat deep inside the cafe watching, and would only call to her when she was almost out of sight. “Lost your cool then, man,” he now whispered to himself. “You ba-lew it!” He always thought of the canals when he thought of her. Now they would be reflecting with aching clarity the marvelous painter’s sky. The 44barges and boats would be on the way in, and soon the ducks and swans would be tucking their necks in to sleep. He had to sleep soon, too; it might prolong his life. A few days more.
Ah yes, he thought, you Dutch motherfuckers. I’ve returned. “A Dutch man o’ warre that sold us twenty negars,” John Rolfe wrote, Well, you-all, I bring myself. Free! Three hundred and forty-five years after Jamestown. Now... how’s that for the circle come full?
He did not really care about the Dutch except that she was Dutch. She was thirty-five now, fourteen years younger than he. Would she still be as blonde? (How he had hated that robust blondeness at first after the malnourished black of Africa. The blondeness had been so much like that of the Swedish blondes, jazz freaks who lived on jazz concerts, who saw the black musicians in their staged cool postures; but how he had been attracted to it as well!) Did he love her still—billowing blonde hair; sturdy swimmer’s legs; long, sinewy stride on such a small body and all? (And all? What was all? A memory. Nineteen years old.) He supposed he did love her, transposed, a bit bleached out, in a clinical way, the way you’d discuss it in an analyst’s office. Anal, he thought, list. Shit list. Man, am I on that! But he did want to tell her he was sorry; tell her why it hadn’t worked. He was glad he was still on his feet and able to move about. If he had stayed in the hospital in New York, it would have happened, his dying, and somehow she would have learned about it. No. Stand on two feet and tell her you had her mixed up with someone who happened nineteen years ago.
No pity. Didn’t want that. Perhaps by that time, back in New York, he would have had it, and taken to the winds to watch her and try to comfort her when she cried. She would cry. He would have—you are drunk, he told 45himself, signaling for another drink.
The first time in his life he had ever had Pernod was in a bedbug-ridden flat in the East Village between Christmas and New Year’s. The East Village was just the East Side then. He had drunk it straight and had crossed the street to a party where a painter with a penchant for teenagers was displaying portraits of rhinoceroses with the words mau mau stitched between their legs. As far as Max knew, the painter was still doing rhinoceroses, marrying young girls or knocking them up and leaving them. When last heard from he was doing a trumpet solo in an Athens nightclub—“Saints”—which was the only number he knew, and the Greeks loved him because he was black, because he skipped and danced when he blew, and because he always reminded them of the spring festival when they put on blackface and roamed the streets drunk. There was no more screwing atop the hills in celebration of Oestra. Now the Greeks did it in bed, just like everybody else, nearly. Maybe Max hated that painter so much for so long, not because he was a phony, but because, when he went home that night from the East Village, he felt as though he had a steel-jacketed slug between his eyes. After some time at home, his phone had rung. It was the girl who had sent him fleeing into the streets to get drunk. But everything was all right, after that call. Pernod. What could he associate Scotch with? Bourbon? Gin? Cognac? Beer? There was always something.
Where is she? He would hate to go to her house, but he would if he had to. Maybe he shouldn’t have come. Maybe he should have gone right back out to Orly and returned to the hospital in New York. Comfort at least. But he was here and he hadn’t been any drunker than usual when he decided to come by train. There were only three places to go after Harry Ames dropped dead—another section of 46Paris, New York or Amsterdam. Hell, he planned to go to Amsterdam anyway. Who was he shucking, himself, now? It really hurt to think of old Harry going like that. He should have been drunk and stroking and grinding and talking trash in some broad’s ear. He always said he wanted to go like that.
Then he thought he saw her and he came half out of his chair, but it was someone else. He sat down slowly. How would it go anyway? She would be walking with that stride that made her seem even smaller, it was so long. He would call out. She would stop, for his voice would be the most familiar of all voices. Unbelievingly she would come near the table. He would not rise, merely sit there and motion to a chair with a smile on his face. (Haw! Haw! Surprise, surprise!) He would have a drink in his hand, perhaps even the one he was holding.
The stride was not the same: he fitted it into the one he remembered watching in Holland, Spain, France, Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, Manhattan, East Hampton, Vermont, Mexico... There was something sad about her stride now. The heels of her shoes still rapped sharply on the pavement and the face, that small face with the cheekbones riding high along the sides, was still ready for the smile, the bright, lyrical “Daaag!” And that wise body, curving with motion. Her hair was darker, yes, like gold left too long in the open.
“Margrit! [Lillian!] Margrit! [Lillian!] Margrit! [Lillian!],” he shouted, coming out of his chair like a shot, the pain grabbing deeply at his rectum, and he was halfway across the street, all the while fighting the urge to grab himself, tear himself inside out.
And she stopped. Her mouth sprang open. Her dark blue eyes went bulging. With the deepest part of the eye he saw her start impulsively toward him, but she caught 47herself and stood waving as a leaf in some slight, capricious wind. He stopped too, out of pain and uncertainty; he had blown his lines again. But when he stopped she moved forward. On she came, the bright face ready to brighten even more, the stride now full, heel-rapping, confident. He stood waving, surprised at his own lack of cool, aghast at the waterfall of love he had thought dammed.
“Mox, Mox, it is you?” she said.
That goddamn broad A, he thought, but he said, “Yes.” His arms trembled at his sides. Should he open them and put them around her? Should he simply stand and wait, then wilt when she placed hers around him? Signals. As she approached, her right hand darted out before her, thumb extended ludicrously in the air. Resigned, he took it, shook it gently and placed his left hand over hers. He led her to the table. “Please sit.” It pained him to look at her figure. She wore a blue sweater which, no matter how loose it might have been, would have shown her breasts to tender and exciting advantage; they were always so white and fragile, so vulnerable. Her hips were fuller now. Time does do its work. And her swimmer’s legs, big-calved and just short of being too heavily ankled, still made him itch to stroke them from top to—
He looked into Margrit’s clear blue eyes. He moved his hand up her arm. Quite suddenly his eyes grew wet with remembering and even as he turned his head to fake a cough, he knew that the Pernod had helped to bring the tears on. “Whiskey,” Max said to the waiter, who was watching them. Give her something quick, Max thought, before she starts remembering and runs away. Remembers the bad things.
But she was remembering some things already. She looked at him directly, head on, unblinking, without fear 48or remorse or pity—without, goddamn it, he thought, anything. But hell, he had never been able to decipher her looks, not once except when she cried. God, make me sober—no drunker. “... and another Pernod,” he called, fingering with surprise the half-full glass already in his hand. He took a deep breath and fought down a rising pain. “How are you?” he said.
“Okay, Mox. You? Hi.”
“Fine. Okay. Hi yourself.”
“When did you come?”
“Today. About three hours ago.”
“Are you well?”
“I—never better.” He patted her hand.
“You look sick.” She smiled her thanks at the waiter who placed the drinks before them.
“No. Just tired. Took the train from Paris.”
“Paris? Harry died, didn’t he? It was in De Arbeiderspers and Het Parool and some other papers. Were you there?”
Max smiled. The Europeans. The goddamn Europeans with their Black Peters and Black Madonnas and blackface celebrations. Five hundred years of guilt transposed into something like vague concern for anyone with a black skin. But Harry was loved more in Europe—and hated too—but not more than back home. There was some kind of balance here that the New York Times and the Chicago Sun-Times and the “Skibbidum Times” could never have when it came to Harry Ames. He spoke: “I was just a bit too late. We were to have drinks that day—”
“Oh, Mox, it must have been awful for you.”
He felt angry. “Hell, it was all right! Harry was my friend, like a brother. But he had to go. We all have to go. He went quick. Didn’t hurt at all. I’m all right. You know me.”
Margrit bent her head and studied her Scotch. It was 49
