Negro Digest - Freedom Archives

edefine your relationship with your
surroundings . It makes you open
your eyes and enables you to see
much more than what is in front of
you . While reading this book, we
see through mirrors, across continents,
into other cultures, and unconsciously
we feel-that is, if we
are capable of feeling . John A . Williams
has written an extensively
handsome and dangerous novel .
Jean-Paul Sartre said, "It is true
that all art is false ." He lied, or he
was talking about white Western
art . The book in question is a work
of Art . That is, if art, among other
things, is a creative effort that
others can identify with, an accent
on a particular life-style, communication,
a bringer of knowledge, a
mind wakener, movable prose
52
JOHN _A . ~~ILLIA~IS
which is esthetically pleasing and
meaningful and, in essence, one
artist's comment on life as he views
it . The work of Art is The Man
Who Cried I AM and the artist is
John A . Williams .
Mr . Williams' fourth novel successfully
deals with the many acute
problems that confront the black
writer as well as the black man .
This novel should be of the utmost
interest to the black writer, for it
covers the literary world of the
black writer over a span of about
30 years, that whole black-white
era of interdependency . The protagonist
is one Max Reddick, who
could very well be Williams himself,
a black journalist for a `'Timestyle"
magazine and a novelist of
some stature . The main supporting
character is the "father" of black
literature, Harry Ames (Richard
Wright) . The action fluctuates between
these two men .
As the novel unfolds, we are introduced
to facsimiles of the major
black writers and white critics of
the last 20 years . There are characters
who resemble James Baldwin,
Chester Himes, Ralph E1lison,
Frank Yerby, Carl Van Vechten,
Granville Hicks, \\~illiam Faulkner,
and others .
On the civil and human riehts
scene, there is Martin L . King,
Malcolm X and the philosophies of
Marcus Garvey and W . E . B . Du
Bois .
Max Reddick is what one might
call an internationalist . A once
(Continued on page 77)
March 1968 NEGRO DIGEST