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Captain
Blackman
Excerpt
Introduction
by Alexs Pate It
is fortuitous for us that John A. Williams combined his intense interest in history,
his continuing fictional meditation on the realities of African American men,
and his singular skills as a novelist to tell the story of Captain Blackman. Williams’s
literary nature is to take his readers to places they have never been, perhaps
never contemplated, and render them instantly believable, if not familiar. In
<Captain Blackman> you will find yourself tumbling through tropes, each
one illuminating further the accumulating anxiety that is privileged to African
American men. We begin in Vietnam, where our captain is caught in an ambush by
the North Vietnamese and falls wounded into the swamp. But he is no ordinary soldier.
He is Captain Blackman. Every-blackman. A soldier in each and every army America
has sent forth—marching and killing—in defense of democracy. As
he lay there, waiting for his comrades to reconnoiter their way through a hail
of bullets and rescue him, Captain Abraham Blackman is overtaken by his own history
which rises, like a shroud, out of the Southeast Asian swamp. And as the history
of black soldiering embraces, we are transported back to the beginning. To the
Revolutionary War. It
is a most appropriate first stop in our dream-like journey. From the first battles
of Concord and Lexington in 1775, black soldiers fought with the colonials against
England. Many names of the black men who fought in those battles are recorded.
Names like Peter Salem, Cato Stedman, Cuff Whittemore, Cato Wood, Prince Estabrook,
Caesar Ferritt, Samuel Craft, Lemuel Haynes, and Pomp Blackman. One of the most
distinguished heroes of the Battle of Bunker Hill was Peter Salem who, it is said,
fired the shot that killed Major John Pitcairn of the Royal Marines. So
it is natural to begin this historical fiction here. From the infancy of this
country, the desire of black people to demonstrate the full measure of their humanity
and to have it recognized has manifested itself in no greater fashion than their
participation in America’s armed forces. Through conscription or volition, black
soldiers have stood upon the same ground as their other American brothers. They
have occupied, perhaps, more than their fair share of space in harm’s way. In
this story, we experience a series of military conflicts—the Revolutionary War,
the War of Charleston, the Spanish American War, World War I, World War II, and
the Vietnam War—from the consciousness of Abraham Blackman. All engagements in
which African American soldiers have fought, died, mourned defeat, and celebrated
victory. And
it is through these conflicts that we begin our own march toward understanding.
We are led to see the details of the history of African American men in the military.
These men lived in a world, in each generation, where the clearest obstruction
in their quest for respect, wholeness, and love came in the form of racial bigotry
and irrational fear. It is ironic perhaps that this quest is best exemplified
in chronicling the participation of black Americans in the military. Clearly African
American men hoped that valor and bravery would stand as proof of humanity and
equality. This
is the territory and value of <Captain Blackman.> While it explores the
gradual progression in sophistication, self-confidence, and agency that has accompanied
success for blacks in the military, it also sharply outlines the racism within
the army that tried to undermine and/or limit that success at every point of upward
movement. Lucky for us that Abraham Blackman is always there to bear witness.
Perhaps
no other contemporary African American author has contributed so thoroughly to
the understanding of black American men. He understands them, loves them, and
is as unapologetic for their strength of character as he is for their sexuality.
Throughout his novels, he explores the experiences of black men as intrepid, literate,
fallible heroes. In
<Captain Blackman,> Williams continues his illustrious efforts to delineate
not only the experiences of African American men, but also the political and economic
realities that provide context for their lives. As
readers, we benefit from Abraham Blackman’s ability to understand widely disparate
fragments of information and to integrate them into an explanation of the world
which envelops the black soldier. His consciousness and knowledge about the reality
that surrounds blackness, i.e. whiteness, empowers him. He knows, for example,
when he is among the colonial slaves anxious to fight the British in exchange
for their freedom that it will be their great-grandchildren who finally achieve
that goal, not them. And yet he fights alongside them. Later
in the book, in a completely different war, Abraham Blackman thinks, "There
is something innately wrong with us, with every man in this truck and in all the
other trucks. We know the man’s using us because he’s in a tight; we know he don’t
give a shit one way or the other if we die or not." It
is important to note that <Captain Blackman> appears at the end of the Black
Arts Movement (1960 – 1970). Williams is considered one of the notable literary
figures of this movement, publishing four novels—<The Angry Ones> (1960),
<Night Song> (1961), <Sissie> (1963), and <The Man Who Cried I
Am!> (1967)—during this decade. Indeed, he is one of the few novelists identified
with a movement that was committed to constructing an aesthetic that had, at its
heart, the interests of African Americans. "The Black Arts of the 1960s proposed
to create politically engaged expression as a corollary to the new black spirit
of the decade." (<The Norton Anthology, 1997,> pg. 1797) Richard
Wright once wrote that black and white America were in a struggle over the definition
of reality. This struggle greatly intensified during the 1960s and 1970s. These
years were marked by violent eruptions of anger in many urban areas, as well as
government sanctioned terror against "radical" elements, frustration,
and instability, both domestically and internationally. Amidst the energetic and
sometimes violent protests against the United States’s undeclared war with Vietnam
and political and racial assassinations (John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King,
Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy), the Black Arts Movement emerged as a collective
desire on the part of black artists to define themselves and their culture. As
in every other cultural arena, Black writers took upon their shoulders the task
of articulating an aesthetic framework for writing and reading African American
literature. No longer were classically western oriented critical standards the
only mechanism for calculating the significance of black art. Black people would
decide what was "good" art and what wasn’t. Black writers would tell
the stories of black heroes. Indeed the very definition of the hero would be challenged,
as so many other facets of reality would also be. One
of this novel’s great accomplishments is the recounting of military history, with
regard to African American soldiers, from the beginning to the Vietnam War, which
provides context for Abraham’s journey. Williams calls forth his military experience
(the navy) and his early career as a journalist (CBS, NBC, <Newsweek,> <Ebony>
and <Jet>) to demonstrate a unique blending of fact and fiction, yielding
an opportunity for the reader to participate in the exploits of Abraham while
understanding the forces that work against him, forces that were forged in the
corridors of white power. Williams,
in the body of his work, calls forth the influences of Hemingway, Updike, Baldwin,
and Wright. It is his attention to the details of story, classically moving us
through a series of tropes—each with its own political and racial truths as backdrop—that
ultimately gives rise to a clear expression of willful existence. Captain
Blackman is cut from this mold. Abraham Blackman exudes a kind of conscious existence
that is never naive or caught unaware. And although he anticipates the challenges
that are likely to confront him and is capable of outthinking his adversaries,
it is often through sheer will that he eludes the full impact of the forces that
mean to bring him down. The
men of Williams’s stories are always multidimensional and almost always find a
way to disturb and dismantle the idea that black men are in any way inferior.
They think. They act. And while the worlds in which they live are not comfortable
or welcoming, these men always find a way to triumph. It
is a wonder that Williams hasn’t been more celebrated as one of America’s great
novelists. Perhaps it is precisely the fact that he emerged in the 1960s, fully
charged with the fervor of the times, that his work has been so much taken for
granted. His heroes are not the forgiving, conciliating people readers of contemporary
American literature hope to discover. Nor are they the illiterate, criminal, struggling
black men that populated many popular fictions prior to Williams’s arrival as
a novelist. <Captain
Blackman> is a literary treasure that has been too long relegated to obscurity.
Its value is many-faceted. First, it articulates in Abraham Blackman a sense of
being and ability rarely found in black male characters of earlier works of fiction.
He is not haunted to incapacity by the mysterious hand of oppression. He is not
rendered helpless and without power. No, as this story is told, Abraham Blackman
is actually one step ahead of the challenges and affronts he knows will come.
He is resourceful, agile, and above all, courageous. After all, he has been trained
by the greatest military force in the world. Second,
this novel provides the point of intersection where African American presence
in the military endeavors of the United States manifests its own history. A history
that is largely untold and fraught with inequities on both the small and the large
scale. Third,
<Captain Blackman> uncovers the massive storage of unrequited love that
African American men have generated since their involuntary appearance in this
country. For in this novel, there is a clear desire on the part of black soldiers
in each conflict to prove themselves—once and for all—worthy of love and respect
from their fellow countrymen. It
is this desire, with its accumulating and concomitant disappointment, that fueled
the fires of the Black Power and Black Arts movements. It also forces its victims,
in this case Abraham Blackman and his comrades, to develop a sense of self-love
capable of surviving the lack of recognition and acknowledgment they receive for
their military service. Indeed
we see Abraham’s capacity for love grow throughout the book. There is of course
his relationship with his comrades, all descendants of men who fought for their
country. They become a family of sorts. Men with names that harken back to slavery
and run forward through time, as Abraham’s own name does. There is also Abraham’s
beloved Mimosa, who waits for him in Saigon and is the one thing that tethers
him to the real world and offers him a sense of refuge and salvation. The
construction of memory and time drives this novel. We are many places at once
and yet, because this novel deals with time, there is a linearity to it. As he
did in <The Man Who Cried I Am!,> Williams here expands the vista of the
African American novel, psychically and geographically. Although their styles
are dramatically different, it recalls the courageous and innovative use of form
conjured by Jean Toomer in his groundbreaking 1927 novel <Cane.> My
notion of the hero, of the African American literary hero, is one that focuses
on the character as maker of his own destiny in a world that is aligned against
him. Characters like this, capable of absorbing all that society throws at them,
including divine providence, still manage to wrangle their way into a consciousness
of self-determination. Like Abraham Blackman in this novel, they take chances.
They are sometimes reckless, but they are smart, capable, and above all, self-conscious.
Abraham
displays this awareness when he echoes a familiar sentiment spoken by black soldiers
of the Vietnam War: "The blacks and the whites really wanted to kill each
other, not the Vietnamese, and only the fact that there were Vietnamese to kill
prevented them, most times, from doing so to each other." Abraham
Blackman’s ethical development is also of interest. It is a stunning moment when,
after witnessing the crimes of war committed by even his own troops, he thinks,
"Once, wherever the American Army had been, from Guam to Germany, its black
soldiers had been its kindest; the stories of those kindnesses were legion. But
today, a sickness of laughing and giggling hit everyone. The whites were relieved
that blacks at last had joined them, had lost finally that essential human quality
for which they were well-known. And his black soldiers had been giggling and murdering
because they’d come to know what it felt like to kill without fear of punishment,
in broad daylight, challenging the universe to break out of position in the heaven;
had come to know, like whites who’d done most of it in history, just how mothafucking
easy it was to kill a colored sonofabitch. "Easy!" "‘No,’
Blackman told himself, waving his platoon into the choppers. ‘No! We’re not joining
them in this shit. We ain’t payin that price for belonging.’" In
the opening pages we find Abraham Blackman pinned down by enemy fire in the swamps
of Vietnam. Abraham realizes he is merely the bait for a planned ambush of his
entire company. He could stay motionless and wait for someone to rescue him, which
would come at the high price of more wounded men. Instead he thwarts the ambush
by cautioning his men to hold back. He is severely wounded, but he saves the lives
of the other men in his company. This is a hero. Toward
the end of the book we learn that he survives this ordeal to receive a medal,
which he clearly does not consider adequate recompense. He has been smarter, braver,
and still more open to love than the people who wanted to see him fail. This is
a sharp lesson that must be learned. Black men who choose a life of legitimate
journey, of positive involvement, consider their efforts largely undervalued and
unrecognized in relationship to their white male counterparts.
This novel is important
because it illustrates a textured view of the complexities of the American consciousness
with regard to race. It drives home the passionate and sincere desire of African
American men to put themselves in harm’s way, if need be, to prove their humanity
and their loyalty to the United States, their hope for a better future. It
denotes an important divergence in the telling of African American history in
that it employs a "many-voiced" system of telling. We are both within
and outside of this story, privileged by a unique, collective omniscience. And
from this we learn of the author’s belief in the willful and purposeful way black
American military men were held back simply because they were not white. And while
there are compassionate and understanding white people throughout this story,
those with power always seem to capitulate to their fears of the growing maturity
and competency of black Americans and allow the injustice and outright brutality
to continue. That
John A. Williams takes us inside the machinations of power makes it all the more
horrifying. He explores the genesis and the rationale of the various orders and
policies which were promulgated to control the progress of integration of the
army. Williams’s ability and desire to do this places him squarely in the Black
Arts Movement. His style is an expression of Black Power. It
is also important in the way it addresses the complex interior life of Abraham
Blackman, particularly his sense of duty and his loyalty to Mimosa, a love that
endures the ages. Indeed love is the only thing that proves an appropriate salve
to the struggles of Blackman. Her dedication to him is strong enough to conjure
"home." "She" is his destination, why he survives. Even in
Southeast Asia, where she has come to be with him, they have created a home. And
this is no mean feat for black men in American fiction. Mimosa
knows him and loves him for what he is, as do the men who serve with and under
him. They, too, bring love. If only the government and individual white men would
make that last, seemingly easy step of apologizing, of professing a recognition
of Blackman that they don’t seem to understand is necessary for their own salvation
and wholeness. When
you are in the military, you are constantly aware of a machine whirling all around
you. You know it is constructing elaborate situations, moving people and equipment
all around. You know it. And you also feel every decision that moves you from
one reality to the next as being impersonal. It of course has very personal impacts,
but it is impersonal in the sense that it isn’t directed at you. But, in <Captain
Blackman,> Williams forces us to see that there is a way in which a hand, an
eye, a conscious force focused precisely on black servicemen, is at work. This
force is, at once, worried about race and unconcerned about racism. It is racist
by its assumptions and allows racism to exist within itself. And it will go to
great lengths to hide this fact. This
is the very soul of the systemic manifestation of race and racism in the United
States government. It is only recently that there seems to be concrete, solid
progress, as evidenced by the tenure of General Colin Powell, an African American,
as the chief military officer during the conflict with Iraq in the mid-1990s.
One of the
singular images of this conflict might well have been Powell’s apparently close
working relationships with his commander in chief, President Ronald Reagan, and
Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. These images may be the proof that this America
has finally accepted the presence of African American men and women as valued
contributors in the defense of this country and as military leaders. But
Williams anticipates this. He knows, and Abraham Blackman discovers, that the
military officers of the field often subvert the orders and directives of their
superiors who, motivated by political desires, want to be seen as being colorblind
in their administration of the military. In
point of fact, a 1999 <Washington Post> article reported that "Three-quarters
of all minorities serving in the military complain that they have experienced
racially offensive behavior, and less than half express confidence that complaints
of discrimination are thoroughly investigated, according to the largest survey
of racial attitudes ever conducted within the armed forces. . . . Defense officials
argued that very different perceptions of race relations reported by whites and
minorities simply mirror attitudes in society as a whole . . ." Indeed,
the complex nature of race relations in America, with all of its subtleties, is
manifest in the military and in this novel. On the one hand the military is one
of the few segments of American society where advancement is grounded in merit.
On the other is the perception that race still plays a role in interpersonal relationships
and also in the opportunities afforded to blacks to demonstrate their ability.
In the end,
Williams returns to the fantastical extrapolation of Abraham’s heroism. It is
here the story situates itself within the sensibilities of the Black Arts Movement.
Abraham Blackman fashions a response to the maltreatment and racial hatred. He
accomplishes something that has only existed in the deep recesses of the African
American psyche: an act of revenge that demonstrates power and control over the
technology and ill will of the white people who caused so much misery. "It
was a mistake, I mean to expect my enemy, which he was, always has been, to reward
my service with equality. A serious misjudgment. Worse, tragic. The tactics—well,
they were dangerous. I mean there were things I was catching from him, just being
in his company. I could feel it deep in my soul; I could see it happening, if
not to me completely, to others. Soldiering to him was just like any other gig
black folks stumble into with white folks. A soldier should get the credit due
him for being responsible for the most abrupt and drastic changes that can be
affected on any society. Man, they sing about soldiers; give them land. Salt.
Women. Money. Pensions. Medals (!). Allowances. They do the cats up in bronze.
They look so noble, even the pigeon shit doesn’t matter. But when they don’t give
you no credit, they’re not obligated to honor you one bit, or to give you a mothafucking
thang, baby." With
this, Abraham constructs his elaborate plan of revenge. We, reading this at the
turn of the twenty-first century, might see it as a clearly unbelievable twist
of an otherwise historically-sound plot. But when considered within the context
of the Black Arts Movement, in the consciousness of an author who is seeking to
embolden, empower, and provide alternatives to the type of treatment African Americans
have suffered, it might just as easily be seen as an act of literary heroism.
Blackman has figured out how to bring America to its knees and accept the power
and force of black intellect fused with black might. And he does this by unifying
the African American desire for equal treatment with an active connection back
to Africa. This
is precisely what an artist who believed in the aesthetics of the Black Arts Movement
would do. To do otherwise, at the time, might easily have been seen as a perpetuation
of the notion that there was nothing Black Americans could do about their plight.
In <Captain Blackman,> Williams will have none of that. Not
many contemporary novelists can claim to have carved out such a wide swatch of
social, political, and racial territory as John A. Williams has. His ability to
weave the epic of "Captain Blackman" as a colorful and intricate tapestry
places him among the very finest story-tellers America has been privileged to
read.
Novels
available in the Coffee House Press Black Arts Movement
Series:
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