Hard truths

Part two of a two-part article.

When
the revered novelist Chester Himes read The
Man Who Cried I Am by relative newcomer John A. Williams in 1969, he could
not contain himself. In a letter to Williams dated June 13, he wrote:

            “But for my money, The Man Who Cried I Am is the
book… a blockbuster, a hydrogen bomb, it is by far the greatest book, the most
compelling book, ever written about THE SCENE… It is a milestone in American
literature, the only milestone produced since Native Son…”

            Williams is indeed a powerful
writer. His novels encompass the scope of history and the personal struggles of
individuals tangled within it. Williams has a gift for language that drives the
narrative forward while making the reader want to linger over his wonderfully
descriptive prose.

            At the age of 77, Williams is the
author of 13 published novels, including Captain
Blackman (1972) and !Click Song (1982), eight non-fiction books, and numerous articles and essays.

            But, when it comes to his frank
descriptions of the black experience, Williams may be too powerful for popular
taste. Despite praise from writers like Himes and Ishmael Reed, he has clearly
not received the recognition his work deserves.

            This may be changing. The Man Who Cried I Am is included among
the QBR (The Black Book Review Online)
Sacred 100. And Williams’ career is the subject of a fascinating exhibition at
the Rare Books and Special Collections Library at the University of Rochester’s
Rush Rhees Library. Richard Peek, the library’s director, believes Williams
will eventually be viewed as one of the most important American writers of the
second half of the 20th century. The Rare Book Library is the repository for
Williams’ papers.

            In last week’s City Newspaper, Williams discussed his
early years, his literary career, and his encounters with prejudice. In the
second part of our interview, we began by asking Williams about covering the
Civil Rights movement as a black journalist.

City: In the 1960s you were covering the Civil Rights movement
for“Newsweek” and other magazines. Obviously
you had strong feelings about this. Did you have any trouble with the blurring
of the line between journalism and participation?

            Williams: No, I didn’t.
And I probably overstepped my bounds when I got on King’s case.

            City: You’ve written more critically than most about Martin Luther King, and very
early on. What did you see as his major short-coming?

            Williams: Women,
primarily. Even as a kid that always upset me, when I would hear parents
talking about Reverend so-and-so and Miss so-and-so. And the preacher’s married
and he’s got a family of his own. I would ask myself, what is this? I decided I
would never, ever be a preacher because I would never be able to screw around
— literally.

            City: Still, King has been elevated to a saint.

            Williams: That’s
alright with me. I’ve had my say-so. As it happened one of my major informants
was a woman I was going with at the time. She had been going with Martin Luther
King. He was even double-crossing her and everybody else he went with, let
alone his wife. He was not a very trust-worthy man in that area.

            City: You met Malcolm X in Africa. You seem to have had a higher opinion of him.

            Williams: We all knew
where he came from and what he was doing. He was a man of very few words, but
they were very powerful words. I was very much attracted to him. I would put
Malcolm in a separate category from the Black Muslims who were going to just
run out and shoot people. I think Malcolm was much too wise for that. Though he
sounded at times like he was very willing to do it, we never saw him pick up
the gun.

            City: Do you think he would disapprove of the kinds of things Louis Farrakhan has
said in recent years?

            Williams: Probably not
now, if he were alive and Farrakhan’s age.

            City: In “The Man Who Cried I Am” you contrast characters that closely resemble King
and Malcolm X, and the Malcolm X character — Minister Q — plays a role in
the book’s climactic scene. He gets a phone call, disclosing a government plot
and then he gets murdered by government agents. In real life wasn’t he was
murdered by rival Black Muslims?

            Williams: My
information is they were paid to kill him by other forces.

            City: What do you think of the state of black leadership today?

            Williams: Where is it?
Who is it? I think there is a vacuum. I just don’t see conditions changing soon
enough or well enough for us to ever produce the kind of person who would be
acceptable to the rest of America, and I think what we have now are poor
selections. The people who could be leaders — Ralph Bunche for example —
they’re just not around, and if they are they’re just drinking their mint
juleps and laying back saying the hell with it.

            City: Of course, if you asked me about white leadership, I’d have some trouble.
[laughs] I have some general questions dealing with issues you’ve written about
or touched on. Do you believe in any form of reparations for blacks in America?

            Williams: Yes, I think
that would be a big help. When I think of the Jewish situation in Germany and I
think of a comparable and perhaps even longer situation for black people here,
it would be a big help. Historically, we are not even given the true figures of
what happened here. I just keep stumbling across a lot of stuff. When I was up
in Rochester I mentioned this work that was done in 1870 by a guy named Weston,
I believe. And it was used in a book published in 1909 in which the figures
given were upward of 40 million Africans. We’re not talking 10 million; we’re
talking 40 million all brought from Africa by the French, the Spanish, the
British, anybody who had a ship. Nobody ever deals with that figure. People
don’t even bother to check out the figures that are going around.

            City: I think the prevailing attitude is that the statute of limitations has run out
on that crime.

            Williams: Ah, but it
hasn’t.

            City: Would you be in favor of monetary reparations?

            Williams: Well, if you
could give me a better one, I might think about it. [laughs]

            City: Some people say policies like Affirmative Action are a way of dealing with
this.

            Williams: But it’s the
same old thing. Look what they’re doing with Affirmative Action. They’re
jawboning it to death.

            City: Do you think the New York Times abused
Affirmative Action by putting Jayson Blair in a position way over his head to
create a black star reporter instead of giving him time to learn the ropes?

            Williams: Yes, I do and
you’re the first person who’s asked me that. [Former New York Times executive editor Howell] Raines is a Southerner.
He’s probably trying to do a good thing but you can’t do that. If you’ve got
somebody young you’ve got to guide him. You’ve got to watch him. You can’t
forgive and forgive and forgive. In a way I feel sorry for Raines. I can’t
imagine copy editors letting that stuff get by in the first place. You’re not
talking about one or two guys; you’re talking about something like a board of
directors.

City: Getting back to books, you use flashbacks extensively inyour novels. Is this to create a more
dream-like feeling? Did you consciously work out this technique.

            Williams: No, it just seemed
to come naturally. You reach a certain point where you feel you are now able to
go back or perhaps even forward without losing the reader or yourself at that
point.

            City: Some of the passages in your books seem to be written in a stream-of-consciousness
sort of flow. In the course of your writing are these passages the toughest or
do they simply flow?

            Williams: Sometimes you
want the stuff not only to flow, but to flow very well, and somehow differently
from other sections where things seem to be so smooth. You do this to get
yourself out of that rut and brighten up your writing and lead the reader
onward to expect even more.

            City: In “Clifford’s Blues” there is a wonderful passage where jazz players use
musical quotes from songs to communicate to each other. How important a role
has jazz played in your work?

            Williams: I’ve always
loved it and I’ve always been a frustrated musician. When I was a kid I was a
very good bugler in a drum and bugle core. I went to Boy Scout camp outside of
Syracuse and I was the camp bugler there. I would do morning calls and evening
calls, tattoos. When I went into the Navy, I became the regimental bugler in my
boot training camp. But I couldn’t afford trumpet lessons, which, in a way, may
have been for the best. My third son, Adam, is a musician. He’s a guitarist and
a producer.

            City: In“!Click Song”the protagonist goes to see Bud Powell and George Shearing at a club,
and Powell ends up punching Shearing. In another scene he goes to see Charles
Mingus and, when he talks too loud, Mingus tells him to shut up. These scenes
seem very real. Are they?

            Williams: Yeah, they
were. [laughs] I remember a session where Charlie Mingus was playing at a club
called the Five Spot on Third Avenue, kind of a smallish club. And I went there
with a couple of buddies of mine and we were chatting and Mingus was trying to
play and finally he said, “You niggers shut up down there!” The Bud Powell
story was told over and over again and everybody thought it was both funny and
sad.

            City: Looking back, who are the 20th-century writers you most admire?

            Williams: I try not to
do that. But one writer I’ve never gotten out of my head or my gut is Malcolm
Lowry — Under the Volcano. It’s
been a long time since I’ve read it, but it’s still there.

            City: What is your view of the current state of book publishing and the lack of solid
literature? Are we losing a generation of real writers?

            Williams: It stinks. If
they are depending on writing to earn money we’re going to lose some talent, I
think. It’s very easy to fall into a groove where you don’t have to think,
scheme, dream, or anything else, you just write out the copy. These books that
are selling for $24 and $29 and $32, that is ridiculous. There’s nothing there.

            City: One thing that turns up again and again in your books is the relationship
between blacks and Jews. How important has that been in your life and work?

            Williams: I grew up in
a community that was essentially black and Jewish in Syracuse. Neighbors and
people who ran stores, and guys I played ball with and went to school with,
were Jewish and my mother worked for a Jewish family, the Rubinsteins for, God,
it seemed like 500 years. She was a maid. It was like two families together.
They had two children. The boy was crippled; he couldn’t talk too well or see
too well. There were actually two families looking out for him. Our
neighborhood in Syracuse was essentially Jewish and was called Jewtown as
opposed to another section of town which was primarily black and that was
called Bloodsfield. [laughs]

            City: In your early work you talk about the tension between blacks and the Jews who
owned stores in ghetto areas. By the time you get to “Clifford’s Blues” there
seems to be more of an empathy.

            Williams: It’s called
survival. I’ve been to Israel three times and it was an extraordinary
experience. I made a lot of friends there.

            City: One of the things I like about your books of a few decades ago is that you are
not inhibited by political correctness. Does political correctness ever get in
the way of your writing today?

            Williams: [laughs] No.

City: What does it mean to you to have your life’s work in a
university archive?

            Williams: It’s very
special. I’m always disappointed that my own university — Syracuse — was not
terribly interested. But Rochester’s close enough to Syracuse.

            City: Are you working on any current books?

            Williams: I’m working
on a novel which is big and fat, and I’ve got one called Colleagues which, believe it or not, has been running around for
eight or nine years. It’s a big sucker. It’s about college professors and all
the politics.

            City: You have no shortage of ironies in your books, so I have to ask you about this
unintentional irony. In “!Click Song” one of the themes deals with black culture
going unrecognized at museums. Discussing one exhibition, you write that King
Tut looks like Michael Jackson. What does it say, culturally, that since your
1982 publication Michael Jackson has had himself carved into a different
statue?

            Williams: I never liked
Michael Jackson. As a matter of fact, I can’t deal with artists who give in to
this whole public thing. That makes me quite uneasy.

            City: The Prix de Rome incident may have hurt your career; if you’d gone to Rome,
you’d have had more opportunities. But you talked about Ellison and how he
didn’t write too much afterwards. One thing that’s never happened to you —
you’ve never lost your edge. I’m not saying it’s a good that they took away the
award, but sometimes it’s the struggle that makes the work great.

            Williams: I think I’ve
gotten over it, so I’m always a bit surprised when people bring it up these
days. I think I’ve gone way past it; I’ve survived, I don’t harbor that many
grudges. What the hell, if you’re going to ride the train of life, sometimes
you have to stand up. The seats are all filled.

Writings
of Consequence: The Art of John A. Williams continues
through September 30 in the Rare Books & Special Collections Library at the
University of Rochester’s Rush Rhees Library, River Campus. Hours: 9 a.m. to 5
p.m. Monday through Friday. Info: Richard Peek, 275-9335.

John
A. Williams, non-fiction

Ours
is not a nation deeply rooted in history; we have no temples or pyramids or
aqueducts that were built with an unimaginable amount of slave labor. Our
glories shall be gained in living up to the ideals we have set for ourselves.
Perhaps that is why it is taking so long. It is comparatively easy to chip out
and haul away a block of limestone and set it into place. It is not so with
people, and I am not ignorant of the fact that much of what we have today was
originally based on slave labor or the next thing to it.

            What we are faced with today is an
alternative: to strive even harder for those credos we set for ourselves or to
chip them from our lives altogether. We can no longer do both; history has seen
to that.

            I searched and came away with hope.
It is there in little pockets. Let it grow; help it grow. I am descended from
the one in every 10 who survived and somewhere in the continuity of the existences
of my forebears I am committed to the search, the hope, the challenge, whether
I want to be or not, for America has yet to sing its greatest songs.

            This Is My Country Too, New American
Library, 1964, 1965

John
A. Williams, fiction

But
it was the wind, I think, the wind that most hypnotized me. The wind said
things; it said things in whispers, gusts and occasional roars. The wind had to
know it all. It had whipped around this earth from the beginning, enveloping it
as it moved through space. The wind had seen and heard everything: long-extinct
beings communicating with !clicks, the Himalayas, the Alps, the Andes exploding
up out of the plain while other ranges, now nameless, slid beneath the sea; it
must have recorded the awesome sounds of lands breaking away to begin their
inch-per-year journeys apart from each other; in reply what would the wind say
about the sudden Cretaceous extinction of the great reptiles: They ate their
own eggs? They drowned in a flood? God had been playing pool and when he
destroyed the planet between Mars and Jupiter it spread deadly iridium over the
Earth? Would this wind echo Akhnaton in his prayers perceiving the sun as
Center, and was it now whispering as it slipped through trees and grasses,
curled miniature tsunamis out on the lake, that all was now being brought to us
by the people who stole everything from the Southern Tribes in whose
sun-drenched lands gods were born? By the people who stole sextant and compass
and grandly presented us with 500 years of Holy Crusades and channeled the
Renaissance northward, evolving Descartes, Hobbes, Rousseau, et al., and who
brought you the first multinational companies and over-ocean trade in souls and
bodies, who implanted ovenry in the tale of Hansel and Gretel and made Jack-the-Real-Culprit
the hero — he who had stolen from the giant sleeping peacefully atop the
beanstalk? Say what, wind, Typhon, Huracan, Zephyr, Tronada? This is being
presented by the people who brought you the spinning jenny and the cotton gin,
the steam engine, the Gatling, Spencer, Colt, the .75, .88, and the .105? And
why not have developed the ICBMs and MIRVs after Dresden, Hiroshima, and
Nagasaki?

            !Click Song, Houghton Mifflin Company,
1982

This article appears in Jul 23-29, 2003.