The Man Who Cried I Am

by John A. Williams

Overlook Press, 412 pp., $14.95 (paper)

In this powerful, largely autobiographical novel that was originally published in 1967, award-winning author and journalist Williams crafts the story of the irrepressible “Negro” writer Max Reddick as he fights to make a difference in the world of the press and of letters. “He wanted to do with the novel what Charlie Parker was doing to music – tearing it up and remaking it.” Battling racial attitudes and barriers every step of the way, his story is told within a narrative arc that spans American social history from World War II into the cauldron of the civil rights era.

We meet Reddick, dying of cancer, on his return to Amsterdam to pay respects to a longtime colleague who has died suddenly. The story flashes back and forth over his successful career as he confronts personal issues of military segregation, job discrimination, interracial marriage, and spiritual self-examination. In much broader strokes Reddick’s career interfaces with 1954’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education desegregation ruling, the independence of African nations in the early 1960s, presidential politics in the “new” Washington, and the nascent rise of the Black Power movement. A major and recurring theme is the expatriation of black intellectuals from post-World War II America to a more accepting social climate in Europe. The book is populated with thinly disguised fictional portrayals of Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Chester Himes, Malcolm X, and JFK.

There is also an interesting examination of the relationship between blacks and Jews, an uneasy coalition viewed here in the context of the publishing industry. Williams’ sensitivity to the Holocaust, which was only 20 years in the past and which he would address directly in a subsequent novel, Clifford’s Blues, plays itself out in a gripping, paranoid vision that practically turns the last part of the book into an espionage thriller. Forty years hence, in our post-9/11 world of Homeland Security, these visions look frighteningly closer to reality.

This article appears in September 17 • 2004.

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