Captain Blackman by John A. Williams

First published: 1972

Type of plot: Social criticism

Time of work: 1971, alternating with dream sequences that progress over the length of the novel from 1775 to 2001

Locale: Every theater of important American military action—from the Revolutionary War to the Vietnam War

Principal Characters:

• Abraham Blackman, the black titular hero, physically and intellectually prepossessing, a career soldier in the U.S. Army with the rank of captain; often of low rank in his historical military dream sequence incarnations
• Mimosa Rogers, Blackman’s tall and attractive black sweetheart, a career worker in the U.S. foreign service, who appears in various incarnations in most of Blackman’s historical dream sequences
• David (Little David) Harrison, small in stature, a black sergeant in Blackman’s Vietnam squad and a staunch best friend in the Civil War and U.S. Cavalry sequences
• Belmont, the black radio operator in Blackman’s Vietnam squad, whose grandfather was a celebrated World War I aviator
• Woodcock, the black medic in Blackman’s Vietnam squad, an officer and a close friend in the World War I dream sequence; representative of “the new black”
• Robert Doctorow, a white soldier of Jewish descent in Blackman’s Vietnam squad; an ideologically committed intellectual as well as a would-be writer, appearing in both the Vietnam and Spanish Civil War sequences—in the latter, as Blackman’s close friend and fellow social worker-turned-volunteer-soldier
• Ishmael Whittman, Blackman’s implacable, flaxen-haired, blue-eyed, white antagonist, always a superior officer, whether major (Vietnam), aide to General Schuyler (Revolutionary War), Union officer (Civil War), or aide to an anonymous aging World War II general

The Novel

The novel opens tensely and excitingly with Captain Blackman pinned down, perhaps fatally, by enemy AK-47 machine-gun fire in Vietnam. When his squad blunderingly attempts a rescue, Blackman heroically “thrust[s] his six-four frame skyward” to fire his own weapon and warn his men away from ambush, a gesture that is contradictory (since he has forbidden his own troops such actions) and, ironically, futile (since, as he notes much later in the book, several of the squad die anyway in a subsequent rocket attack back at base camp).

Wounded severely, if not mortally, Blackman finds himself “as in a dream” transported to revolutionary times in America, in an authorial parallel to Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s court. Williams surpasses Twain in historical scope, however, for Blackman, who has been a diligent student of black military history (even instituting a seminar on it in his company), as he fades in and out of consciousness, proceeds through virtually every significant military action involving Americans, from the Revolutionary War to a racial military apocalypse which occurs, with fitting symbolism, at the turn of the second millennium. Interwoven with and counterpointing the historically based fantasies is the fate of the modern-day Blackman, his sweetheart, friends, and enemies in 1971 Vietnam. With additional complexity, most of these persons are incorporated and fitted into the fantasies as well.

As with the author’s The Man Who Cried I Am (1967), the chapters in this novel have been divided into main sections, each concluding with an important climax. Expressive of the author’s criticism of white society’s unjust treatment of blacks throughout history is that almost every high point, achievement, or joyous moment in the action is followed and counterbalanced by some harsh disappointment or deflation. For example, in the first six chapters that compose section 1, Blackman moves through the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Civil War, encountering (or nearly encountering) many famous historical figures (Crispus Attucks, George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant) and rejoicing in his race’s splendid deeds, which culminate in the black division’s bravery at Petersburg, Virginia, which shames the white soldiers for their cowardice. Yet this triumph is undermined by false face-saving reports of the action, as the sheer number of blacks now armed in the Twenty-fifth Army Corps is negated by official refusal to use the unit.

In section 2, crossing the paths of General Custer, Teddy Roosevelt, and “Blackjack” Pershing, the seasoned Civil War veteran Blackman rises to sergeant major in the U.S. Cavalry, protecting settlers and battling Indians, then fights in the Spanish-American War, finally leaving the cavalry to become a machine gunner in the infantry, where, he perceptively foresees, the military future lies. The exuberant and humorous tone of section 1 gives way to somberness in section 2, as Blackman’s boon companion in both sections, Little David Harrison, is murdered in a Western saloon by white soldiers disguised as cowboys. Equally dismal is the unjust and mass dishonorable discharge of 167 black soldiers of the Twenty-fifth Infantry, with which the section concludes.

The tone swings back to optimism (though always qualified, as by the unfair thwarting of Blackman’s promotion) in section 3, which deals with black American regiments’ almost universally acclaimed exploits in World War I, when they were seconded to the French army, which used them to fight rather than to unload cargo, as originally planned by white American commanders. The section concludes on two jubilant notes. First, Blackman miraculously survives, unscratched, a direct hit by an artillery shell, though all are killed around him (foreshadowing his survival of his Vietnam wounds while also symbolizing his race’s indestructibility). Second, with Woodcock (his companion and superior officer through much of the section), he strides victorious into Germany.

The mood of the second half of the novel oscillates from buoyant, to bleak, and back to exuberant. In section 4, dealing with the Spanish Civil War, Blackman, in the youngest and most idealistic of his incarnations (befitting this war, the author implies), at first is optimistic about his cause and the international and racial integration of his military unit, significantly named The Abraham Lincoln Brigade; but he is quickly disillusioned by the disintegration of the soldiers’ concern for their own race’s and nation’s wounded, his discovery of the fear and impetus to survive that override ideology, and the defeat of his side. While section 5, which deals with World War II, opens on the cheerful note of Blackman demonstrating his superiority by scoring in the top grade of the army’s placement test, it quickly gives way to the gloom of his sweetheart’s infidelity, the loss of his chance for becoming an officer by being caught in one of the epidemic army-base race riots, his wounds from a mortar hit in the Solomon Islands (unlike the World War I artillery shell incident, Blackman does not escape unscathed this time), his forced duty as observer of the massacre of a rebel black unit in the Italian swamps outside Tombolo, and finally the official, racial blocking of his volunteer combat in the Battle of the Bulge.

Section 6, covering the Korean and Vietnam conflicts, gradually ascends from the convalescing of Blackman’s Vietnam wounds (amputation of part of one leg, loss of a lung, and consequent lifelong respiratory troubles) to Blackman’s optimistic decision to survive and revenge himself on Major Whittman (who had treacherously sent him into an ambush) and all he stands for, all paralleled by the accounts of his victories over Whittman in Korea (constantly demonstrating his superior skill), Vietnam (conducting his Black military history seminar), and a final prophetic dream sequence. Set in the year 2001, when Blackman will be seventy, this last episode, which closes the book, shows the novel’s only unmitigated triumph, when Blackman and his race take over the U.S. military and its nuclear forces, conclusively gaining power over their white oppressors in the United States.

The Characters

The author is capable of supplying the odd detail that provides fully rounded characters—the manner in which Johnny Griot (in Blackman’s Vietnam squad) carries his M-60 like a film soldier, the priapic talk and antics of Big Dick (a soldier in Blackman’s segregated World War II barracks), or the way in which Woodcock wears the biggest afro in the company, possibly to compensate for his light skin. Yet, as with his preceding novels, Williams’s main purposes in characterization are didactic and doctrinal: Characters symbolize or are spokespersons for (or both) social positions or points of view in a society that is, overall, racist. Characters are sympathetic toward the black cause, hostile, or somewhere in between. This symbolic or allegorical aspect produces a flattening effect even on the most fully realized and alive character in the book, the hero. For though animating details such as his shoe size (twelve) and preference in wine (Meursault) are provided, what is important about the hero is his embodiment of the indomitable black spirit and the hope for leaders like him who will give blacks the opportunity to live lives of the fullest potential. His allegorical significance is markedly suggested by his name, reinforced by the World War I version of Mimosa’s speculation about it, in the middle of the book: “She thought his name: Abraham. A man you trust. Kind. Like a father?” Besides all these and other connotations of the name “Abraham” by way of Abraham Lincoln, including Lincoln’s reputation as the Great Emancipator (Blackman has fought in the Civil War, as well as in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War), the biblical Abraham is also evoked as another great spiritual leader—and warrior or soldier—in an episode not often remembered, when to liberate his nephew Lot, he takes a small band of 318 to fight against the armies of four kings. The last name of the hero, “Blackman,” combines “black” and “man,” to suggest that he embodies the spirit and yearning of all his people. The character and name of Blackman’s chief antagonist in most sequences are similarly allegorical. The surname “Whittman” is distinctly a combination of “white” and “man,” which is added to his main physical features repeatedly mentioned throughout the novel—his blond hair (the word “flaxen” is used twice) and blue eyes. Whittman is thus archetypally and exaggeratedly white, corresponding to the extremism of his racist attitudes and views. Ishmael, Whittman’s first name, which is revealed only toward the end of the novel, helps express both the sources of Whittman’s hostility and the irony of that hostility. Just as the novel’s Whittman has been constantly made aware of Blackman’s superior abilities (and thus the unfairness of the latter’s inferior rank), so the biblical Ishmael was made to feel inferior and second-class by being cast off by Abraham’s family, and just as Whittman’s guilt generates hostility, so the biblical Ishmaelites were renowned for their ferocity (and often antagonism to the Israelites, Abraham’s descendants). Ironically, though, the biblical Ishmael is Abraham’s son, which recalls the current theory of some anthropologists that humanity’s earliest origins were in Africa—Whittman is Blackman’s “son” in this sense.

Not all whites in the novel are malevolent, by any means. For example, Robert Doctorow admires Captain Blackman, has attended the black military history seminars (enduring the initial animosity of the black auditors), and is sympathetic to the blacks’ cause. Likewise, his Spanish Civil War incarnation is Blackman’s closest friend—about whom Blackman thinks, after learning that Doctorow has been wounded (just as his Vietnam incarnation has): “Somehow Doctorow’s life was tied to his and now that his friend lived, Blackman knew that he would, too.” Doctorow’s Jewish heritage, pointedly referred to in the novel, links him not only with the biblical Abraham but also with another minority that has been oppressed (a motif also to be found in Williams’s The Man Who Cried I Am).

Finally, a complexity in the author’s characterization is created by Williams’s technique of the multiple versions, and thus multiple perspectives, of the characters in different eras. The seasoned, professional veteran in the U.S. Cavalry in Indian territory is different from the Spanish Civil War Blackman, who is a young, idealistic amateur. Nor are these versions identical to the young, urban New York-born Blackman who enlists in the army after World War II to find a better way of life for himself. Similarly, Blackman’s sweetheart, Mimosa, also varies: a young, uneducated slave in the Civil War; a wholesome, somewhat parochial small-town girl during World War I; a married yet adulterously adventurous woman during World War II, who finally jilts Blackman for a sailor; a poised, sophisticated career woman in the Vietnam episode, devoted and faithful to Blackman. Human beings are not merely allegorical symbols, the author seems to be suggesting, and are importantly affected by their environment.

Critical Context

In some respects, John A. Williams’s corpus is remarkably homogeneous. Many of the obsessive themes and concerns of his previous novels Night Song and The Man Who Cried I Am recur in Captain Blackman. The conspiratorial view of events in society can be found in the enigmatic death of Richie Stokes (Eagle) in Night Song and the apocalyptic King Alfred document in The Man Who Cried I Am. The need to strike back is glimpsed in a remark by Eagle about getting money to buy weapons (Night Song) and in protagonist Max Reddick’s purchase of a veritable arsenal in The Man Who Cried I Am. Further, the centrality of love is expressed by the relationships between the main characters Keel and Della in Night Song and Max Reddick and Margrit in The Man Who Cried I Am (indeed, Max dies saying Margrit’s name, similar to Blackman’s utterance of Mimosa’s before firing at the Vietnamese enemy).

Also, Captain Blackman is in some respects adumbrated by The Man Who Cried I Am. The apocalyptic plan for racial genocide of blacks in the latter is answered in the former by Blackman’s counterconspiracy; Max Reddick’s military experience and his vow to a Kennedy aide that he could recite to him a documented history of maltreatment of blacks in the military and elsewhere are elaborated in Captain Blackman.

This novel is, however, an advance over the others. While as socially conscious and didactic as Williams’s preceding works, it is not marred by long, repeated speeches by characters about white injustice. Characters are portrayed more deftly, with more interest shown in them, and there is a greater mustering of vivid and memorable minor characters (such as Flag Sergeant Anselmas Plancianois, Old Man Flood, black frontier scout Brit Johnson, Lieutenant Buck Himes, Richard Boston, Gummidge, Linkey, and “The Gold Dust Twins”—Flash and Tisdale). Moreover, while humor is repeatedly referred to in Night Song and The Man Who Cried I Am, this novel genuinely possesses humor, in the form of Blackman’s flatulent outburst used to comment on General Schuyler’s revolutionary war racism, the historical joke about Blackman and Peter Salem not clearly hearing at Breed’s Hill the now enshrined remark, “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes” (“What did he say?” “I think he said to shoot them in the eyes”), and the ingenious way that British soldiers escape death in the hopeless charge in the Battle of New Orleans.

Perhaps his most artistically finished work, Captain Blackman in its scope and marvelous interweaving of different times in a single story compares favorably with John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. (which is recalled by the “Cadences” and “Drumtaps” sections) and with Tim O’Brien’s complex, more-than-Vietnam novel, Going After Cacciato (1978), winner of the National Book Award.

Bibliography

Bruck, Peter. “Protest, Universality, Blackness: Patterns of Argumentation in the Criticism of the Contemporary Afro-American Novel.” In The Afro-American Novel Since 1960, edited by Peter Bruck and Wolfgang Karrer. Amsterdam: Grüner, 1982. Discusses how postwar African American literature and criticism are codified by the aesthetic standards established by Black Nationalists during the 1920’s. Mentions how such writers as Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Alain Locke saw a distinct correlation between literary and political thought. Provides a context for the literary aesthetic and politics of Williams’s writings.

Bryant, Jerry H. Victims and Heroes: Racial Violence in the African American Novel. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997. Includes a chapter on the relationship between realism and violence in Williams’s novels.

Cash, Earl A. John A. Williams: The Evolution of a Black Writer. New York: Third Press, 1975. The first book-length study of Williams’s work, both nonfiction and fiction. Provides cogent discussion of the double literary standard historically applied to African American work and sets out to explode such standards. Sees Captain Blackman as making two major points: that African Americans will continue to be trapped by history until they recognize that they can learn from it and that the cyclical pattern of history will eventually prompt whites to reckon with African Americans. The appendix contains two interviews of Williams by Cash.

Gayle, Addison, Jr. The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1975. Investigates Williams’s fiction linearly, as a progression from protest to assertion. Cites Captain Blackman as an outstanding example of Williams’s keen historical analysis.

“John A. Williams.” In African American Writers, edited by Valerie Smith. Vol. 2. 2d ed. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2001. Useful summary of the author’s life and work.

Muller, Gilbert H. John A. Williams. Boston: Twayne, 1984. A full-length study of Williams’s work to 1982. Offers a careful analysis of nine of Williams’s novels. Sees an evolution in Williams’s work, culminating in a tentative spirit of affirmation in the later works. Asserts that Captain Blackman is the most technically complex of the nine novels discussed.

Nadel, Alan. “My Country Too: Time, Place, and Afro-American Identity in the Work of John Williams.” Obsidian II: Black Literature Review 2, no. 3 (1987): 25-41. Examines the sense of repetition and dislocation in Captain Blackman. Discusses Williams’s use of modernist narrative conventions to reflect the historical, geographical, and psychological displacement of the African American experience. Views Blackman as the quintessential African American soldier, who is continuously sacrificed in American history or erased from its pages.

Pate, Alexs. Introduction to Captain Blackman, by John A. Williams. Minneapolis, Minn.: Coffee House Press, 2000. Reevaluation of the novel’s importance by the author of Amistad (1997) and Losing Absalom (2002).

Schraufnagel, Noel. From Apology to Protest: The Black American Novel. Deland, Fla.: Everett/Edwards, 1973. Provides a clear and concise survey of Williams’s novels from the 1960’s, claiming that Williams has moved on to militant social protest in his fiction.

Williams, John A. “Son in the Afternoon.” In This Is My Best: Great Writers Share Their Favorite Work, edited by Retha Powers and Kathy Kiernan. San Francisco, Calif.: Chronicle Books, 2005. This short story, which is Williams’s best according to his own judgment, is preceded by an introduction by the author in which he explains why he chose it. Provides invaluable insight into the writer’s self-evaluation and his understanding of his own aesthetic goals and accomplishments.