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