The Man Who Cried I Am Read online

  PRAISE FOR The Man Who Cried I Am

  “This is an intensely American book.… At the same time, the book soars past American boundaries … a writer who cries, with humor, and anger, pride and passion, I am.”

  —THOMAS J. FLEMING, The New York Times Book Review

  “The Man Who Cried I Am is the book, like the man. It is a blockbuster, a hydrogen bomb, by far the greatest book, the most compelling book, ever written about The Scene. Williams is the only man, writer or layman, black or white, who knows the inside of the scene, the other side. This is a book white people are not ready to read yet, neither are most black people who read. But is the milestone produced since Native Son. Besides which, and where I should have begun, it is a damn beautifully written book.”

  —CHESTER HIMES

  “Make no mistake about it. Williams is a solid, vigorous, professional writer, of whom one has every reason to expect fine things.”

  —SAUL MALOFF, Newsweek

  “A forceful, penetrating story of commitment and disillusionment … a powerful novel in which a dying Negro writer and intellectual tries to come to terms with himself and this country.”

  —ELIOT FREMONT-SMITH, The New York Times

  “His novelistic skills are formidable.”

  —JOHN LEONARD, The New York Times Book Review

  “That excellent writer John A. Williams has turned his novelist’s eye on the racial situation in the United States … Absorbing and disturbing … a book to keep you reading into the midnight hours.”

  —ROBERT CROMIE, The Chicago Tribune

  “John Williams’s novel is very powerful … obviously in the Baldwin and Ellison class … magnificent.”

  —JOHN FOWLES

  “An angry, raw, deeply perceptive novel about blacks and whites, man and woman, power and humaneness. Its climax is a fascinating combination of morality play and chiller.”

  —MALCOLM BOYD

  “Williams is such a disciplined writer that the elements of sensation do not overshadow what is fundamentally an inventive and well-structured literary work.… An articulate writer who dares to think the unthinkable.”

  —WILLIAM HOGAN, San Francisco Chronicle

  “Williams is a fine writer, a powerful writer, and he has a story to tell of an American Negro, driven from within to write against terrific odds. He places this Negro writer amidst a situation of international intrigue, and the story that emerges is forceful yet heartbreaking.”—Houston Chronicle

  “A bold, sweeping, tough, and eminently provocative book—automatically places John A. Williams in the rank of American novelists who count.”

  —DONALD STANLEY, San Francisco Examiner

  “Williams is a sledgehammer writer, having the skill and wisdom to present finely chiseled characters, and making James Baldwin’s novels look as tame as apple pie.”

  —JAY BAIL, Chicago Sun-Times

  “It would be an injustice to John A. Williams to call him an outstanding Negro writer. He is simply one of the better novelists around.”

  —FRED SHAQ, The Miami Herald

  “Its insights are considerable; its power cannot be gainsaid; its humanity everywhere abounds; its anger and its pain are its triumph.”

  —DON ROBERTSON, Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “A big, overpowering book, written with as much sadness as bitterness … it is impossible not to be moved by Mr. Williams’s tormented hero.”

  —Daily Telegraph (London)

  “A monumentally large novel … A solid and disturbing picture of a whole man, a convincing hero.”

  —New Statesman

  “A seething, angry book that is more than a fine novel.… an important document of its time … a major book whose large theme is handled with superb skill and disciplined fury. It is certainly the best novel I have read this year.”

  —ERIC MOON, Library Journal

  “John A. Williams is a first-rate talent of unquestionable authenticity, and the peer of any man writing today.… Here we have as delicate and perceptive a study of the loneliness of the writer as has ever been written.”

  —GERALD KERSH, Saturday Review

  “The merits of John Williams’s novel go far beyond the degree to which different men may find its conclusion plausible.”

  —Kansas City Star

  “Probably the best novel written about the 1960s … John A. Williams is probably the best African-American writer of the century.” —ISHMAEL REED

  The Man Who Cried I Am

  A Novel

  John A. Williams

  Introduction by Walter Mosley

  New York

  TUSK IVORIES

  The phrase “it’s a classic” is much abused. Still there may be some appeal in the slant of the cap Overlook sets in publishing a list of books the editors at Overlook feel have continuing value, books usually dropped by other publishers because of “the realities of the marketplace.” Overlook’s Tusk Ivories aim to give these books a new life, recognizing that tastes, even in the area of so-called classics, are often time-bound and variable. The wheel comes around. Tusk Ivories begin with the hope that modest printings together with caring booksellers and reviewers will re-establish the books’ presence and engender new interest.

  As, almost certainly, American publishing has not been generous in offering readers books from the rest of the world, for the most part, Tusk Ivories will more than just a little represent fiction from European, Asian, and Latin American sources, but there will be of course some “lost” books from our own shores, too, books we think deserve new recognition and, with it, readers.

  To Lori

  Introduction

  BY WALTER MOSLEY

  The Man Who Cried I Am shouts into the void for all of us. He (whether you call him Max Reddick or Harry Ames or any other brother or sister in the streets of Los Angeles, New York, or Timbuktu) calls out from a great distance. His voice blending in with the wind, the street noise, the sounds of passionate love-making coming in through the walls. The cries are unmistakable but their meaning is hard to decipher. Is it a warning? Is it the blues? Has this man had enough and just needs to scream to let off steam?

  We know that it’s important what this man is saying. We can tell that by the timbre of his cries but it could mean so many things. Black people have been hollering out in pain for centuries, fighting for freedom, dying in slavery, belittled by little men, and denied by kings and history. Sometimes these black folk have just laid down and died. But mostly they have survived with deformed psyches and distorted notions of the world. Sometimes evil has begotten evil and the one-time slave has slaughtered and even cannibalized his oppressor.

  The Man Who Cried I Am called out in English and French and Dutch language. He forgot his own tongue and so found his words ill-fitted to the task at hand – though still eloquent. But even here his mastery of the master’s tongue called down taunts and barbs though most people who listened only concerned themselves with the music and not the words.

  John A. Williams’s magnum opus earned him international acclaim when it was first published in 1967. There’s little wonder why. This novel breaks down the barrier between the epic poetry of the pre-literate world and the modern-day novel; it combines history with high literature and then adds popular fiction because it is a book for everyone, all of us lost in the machinations of a world gone awry.

  I suppose that one could compare this book with other modern masterpieces like Invisible Man and Native Son. It certainly stands up to those books with its deep understanding of mid-century America and the racism and imperialism that presses her, even now, into the twenty-first century. Williams understands the politics and exclusions, the crushed spirits and incredible survivals o
f that world and of the black men and women (and the white men and women) who lived through it. But to contrast Williams with Ellison and Wright would be to call him a Negro writer; as if race had anything to do with his genius.

  I could on the other hand try to put Mr. Williams’s work side by side with Mann or Malraux or Joyce. The romanticism and existentialism and artistic sense would certainly fit the depth of the work. But here I would have you believing that this novel is merely a work of contemporary literature when indeed it is so much more than that.

  To understand the profound nature of this book we should start with the father of the tradition—Homer. This novel is certainly an Iliad and an Odyssey. The battlefield is a race war exacted upon an entire continent and every representative of that continent everywhere in the world. And the journey home is more dangerous than Odysseus could ever imagine. The heroes here are not warriors but poets trying to describe the world so that they can restore the fabric of truth that has blown ragged with the passage of centuries.

  We know from the first page that Max’s battle is lost. We know from the beginning that Home has been burned to the ground and that love, though ever-present, shall never keep its own company. Williams’s epic is also a tragedy without even the benefit of the final scenes. Instead characters fade away while no one is looking. Death occurring as naturally as it does in real life.

  Like the Greek bard Williams treats us to long lists of the materials in his world. But we aren’t presented with the oxen and arrows and swords of the ancient Greeks. Williams gives us the insults and limitations, the self-prohibitions and self-hatreds of the ex-slave. The packs of cigarettes, bottles of whiskey, acres of sex, and the myriad forms of ever-present violence visited upon women and men who walk through the world as if it were a sleeping prison waiting to rise up and close in.

  There are dozens of women who come near to our protagonist. They all have beauty and power and they are all unable to help Max escape the pain of his life. Rather than a woman waiting for him at the end of the journey there are women waiting for him everywhere; waiting—but our Odysseus, Max, is always, always a day late.

  In these pages we experience World War II in its less heroic moments, anti-Semitism, homophobia, racism (inside and out), Jim Crow, Europe, the fiction writer’s life, the political life, the journalist’s life, and the faith of fools.

  In a brilliantly detailed thumbnail sketch we are shown how two ham hocks and a sack of beans can keep a man going for a week or more.

  There are three races present in Max Reddick’s world: whites, Negroes, and Jews. Between them there are all manners of misinterpretation and distrust. But no one can be defined solely by race. There are black traitors, Jewish princes (and princesses), and white guys who live and let live.

  If The Man Who Cried I Am were a painting it would be done by Brueghel or Bosch. The madness and the dance is a never ending display of humanity trying to creep past inevitable Fate.

  The novel begins in the sixties with a man who is dying of cancer. Max Reddick has traveled to Europe to say his final good-byes to his friend and rival Harry Ames, who has died quite recently. There is no future here. Max travels from Amsterdam to Leiden in real time while in his mind he drifts back to the forties in New York and then the war in Italy. He remembers his days among black people in Africa and Paris and the deep south. The events of the book transpire in less than three days but we get a whole lifetime therein. And not just the life of an interesting, if damaged, genius but also a world of change unknown to those Americans used to celebrating the United States’ mid-century battle for freedom against the communists and the fascists.

  In his memories we see many recognizable characters with different names. Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, Richard Wright, JFK, and many others. These semi-fictionalized characters are enthralling but they pale next to the story that unfolds.

  The first section of the book burrows in the gut like the cancer afflicting Reddick. It turns over a fertile soil in which he is destined to sow his final seed.

  This beginning is an ode to Death, a delirium of a bitter man’s last days. There’s no sugar coating, no Good Negro. This is a story about a man facing a monumental enemy—his own mortality in a world that conspires against him.

  The story is delivered in a Bebop tempo with complex intertwining themes that would challenge Charlie Parker’s improvisational skills.

  One of the most enthralling aspects of the novel is that it moves exactly as a fictive narrative should: a swirling whirlpool in descending cycles, a conically flowing river of thought realized in ever-changing parallels.

  Reminiscent of Moby Dick the narrative voice is elusive. It has all the earmarks of a classic first-person narrative delivered almost tongue-in-cheek in the third-person voice. But at times the thread of the story turns away from Max to delve into the private lives of separate characters and situations.

  The cry of this novel does not only echo through our past. In a way it is a visionary story predicting through its cracked prism the Patriot Act and the neo-con plan to control natural resources from the Middle East to India. I can imagine that many a moderate reader would have felt the fever of paranoia upon reading this book in the late sixties. But today even the most conservative American might be ready to consider the thriller-like conspiracy that Max uncovers at the end.

  This novel cannot be contained inside of an introduction or even a single reading. From the first page there is the urgency of a man who has never had enough time, of an afflicted people who stood in the waiting room until they expired and were replaced by their children’s children’s children. You feel Max’s frustration and turn the pages impatiently wanting to know that he will find success or love or at least a moment’s respite. When he’s a fool you curse him and when he’s wronged you remember your own circumstances. And when you get to the end you begin rereading sentences and paragraphs to make sure that you understand exactly how these final moments play out. But then you realize that there was another level to the book, another novel buried inside the vignettes and subplots. Another story was unfolding while the bittersweet pain of Max and his friends took the limelight.

  At some point you realize that Max was not a victim but a hero. His life was not as he experienced it. He never found what the foreign (master’s) tongue articulated as happiness but he lived a magnificent (even epic) existence. Fate, I finally found myself believing, conspired to make Max’s greatness. He lived in interesting times and navigated through them. He lived to the fullest even in the last moments of his life.

  Who but a Homeric hero could make such a claim?

  The canvas for this novel is the history of America, and much of the west, painted over by John A. Williams in economic strokes—like a kind of graffiti. The president holding out a hand in welcome has a rude pistol pasted onto his fingers. The Good Negro bowing in front of his mistress is hiding an erection while glancing furtively at a landscape that is being rained upon by droplets of blood. Peasants are freed by genocidal armies and Africa eats its own flesh under the table of European conquest.

  These templates, placed upon a history we thought we knew, are disturbing and, once exhibited, they take their place in the mind next to Max’s cancer. We become aware of the possibility for corruption under the veil of lies placed upon us by the maneuverings prompted by madness and greed.

  The indictment was true in the year it was published, it is true today, and a thousand years from now, when America has another name and is peopled by technologically enhanced mutants that combine the attributes from a hundred species, it will still be a document extolling the best and worst characteristics of humanity.

  Part One

  1

  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. Throug
h 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 would 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.