A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich by Alice Childress

First published: 1973

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Social criticism

Time of work: Early 1970’s

Locale: Harlem, New York

Principal Characters:

• Benjie Johnson, a thirteen-year-old heroin addict
• Rose Johnson, Benjie’s mother
• Craig Butler, a struggling maintenance man who wants to marry Rose

The Novel

A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich traces the devastating effects of drugs on its principal character, Benjie Johnson, his family, and society. Born into a poor family in the ghetto of Harlem, Benjie wanders aimlessly into the jaws of destruction. Benjie has been taught never to be “chicken,” so when he is challenged into taking drugs, he responds by showing his friends that he can take heroin without becoming a casualty. The issues of identity and the quest for wholeness that surround Benjie’s motivation for taking drugs become significant in the light of the fact that the novel is set in the period immediately following the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s. A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich mirrors urban ghetto life, depicting African Americans who seem fragmented and alienated because of race, gender, and class barriers.

The novel opens with Benjie trying to convince himself that he is not a junkie and that he can give up heroin at any time. He suffers from depression because his mother loves Craig Butler, a struggling but dignified maintenance man whom Benjie feels has replaced him as head of the house. While Butler tries to act as a positive role model and strong stepfather for Benjie, the youth moves to discredit and to enrage him at every turn.

Benjie copes with feelings of displacement by associating with gang members, who influence him to experiment with drugs. Benjie smokes marijuana until one day he finds himself in the company of young men who have moved from marijuana to heroin. Benjie proves to the gang that he is not afraid of drugs by taking heroin. Childress portrays Benjie as an arrogant teenager who believes he has to prove something to the world while simultaneously depicting him as a hurting, confused, sensitive youth who craves love and security.

Before Benjie is aware of what is happening to him, he becomes a junkie. He finds himself demanding that Tiger, a small-time pusher, introduce him to a “connection” who has easy access to heroin. Tiger introduces Benjie to Walter, a callous pusher who cares only about money. Walter sells Benjie heroin and later involves him in the sale of drugs.

Benjie soon crumbles under the pressure of drugs and school. Two of his teachers notice that Benjie is inattentive in class. Once a bright young student, Benjie nods daily or skips school. His teachers report him to his parents, and he is placed in a detoxification center.

Benjie’s treatment is short-lived; within a week after treatment he steals to get a fix. His stealing is connected to his resentment toward Butler’s relationship with his mother. Benjie sets out to prove that Butler, like Benjie’s father, can be made to leave. He succeeds in provoking Butler by selling his suit and overcoat to buy drugs. Butler moves because he fears he will physically abuse Benjie.

Although Butler has good cause to abandon Benjie, he does not. When Benjie steals a toaster from the boardinghouse where Butler lives, Butler chases him to throttle him. During the chase, Benjie tries to leap over rooftops and finds himself hanging on to the edge of one. He begs Butler to let him die, to end his misery, but his stepfather saves him.

The novel concludes with Butler waiting in the cold for Benjie to appear for a counseling session. Childress leaves readers wondering whether Benjie, who claims to be drug free, has chosen to seek another fix.

The Characters

Benjie Johnson searches for love to fill the void left by his biological father, who abandoned him. He is angry, frustrated, distrusting, manipulative, and rebellious. He experiments with drugs because he believes that taking drugs will make him a man, especially in the eyes of his wayward friends. Childress suggests that without proper nurturing, Benjie and others in his predicament are on their way to becoming statistics.

Alice Childress’s use of multiple narrators in A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich vivifies the trauma, uncertainty, and dangers experienced by a poor, young black male growing up in the ghetto, where, as Benjie says, “a chile can get snatch in the dark and get his behind parts messed up by some weirdo.” The myriad narrators help to illuminate Benjie’s real problem: insecurity. Each of the narrators sheds light on a young man who is in dire need of someone to give him a sense of self. He deliberately tries to alienate everyone who offers him help because he does not see himself as a drug addict but as an occasional drug user. Benjie’s perceptions of reality are countered by his mother, his teacher, his friend Jimmy Lee, his doctor, and his stepfather.

Rose Johnson and her mother are presented as women who head the Johnson household but who are powerless to help Benjie. He sees his mother and grandmother as nervous women who make him nervous in turn. His inability to relate to them is exacerbated by their going to a conjure woman/fortune-teller to secure a potion meant to steer Benjie from drugs. With these two women, Childress suggests the ineffectuality of the efforts of women trying to teach boys how to be men in a society that strangles them. While these women love Benjie dearly and make sacrifices for him, he seems to need something more, something they cannot give him.

Childress clearly suggests that in many cases black men are better suited to nurture black boys. Benjie’s teacher Nigeria Greene, a Black Nationalist, tries to instill self-esteem in Benjie. He spends hours with Benjie, trying to shield him from the destructiveness of the streets. When Benjie comes to class in a daze and with needle marks in his arm, Nigeria turns him over to the principal and subsequently to the authorities for drug rehabilitation. He tells Benjie that it is “nation time,” a time for black people to save one another.

Benjie distances himself from his drug-free friends, especially Jimmy Lee. It is from Jimmy Lee that readers learn that Benjie started experimenting with heroin as a result of peer pressure. When Jimmy Lee tells Benjie to straighten up because heroin will kill him, Benjie merely dismisses Jimmy Lee as a would-be social worker.

Another character Childress uses to suggest that black men can and must take responsibility for other black men is Benjie’s doctor, who, in a fatherly manner, tries to give Benjie hope. He tells him to start over, noting that “the world ain’t perfect” but, nevertheless, “Hard as it is, life is still sweet.” It is these words of encouragement that Childress places strategically to anchor Benjie. The doctor is a significant character because he represents for Benjie the possibility of survival and success for black men.

While Benjie has Nigeria Greene, Jimmy Lee, and the doctor to bolster his self-esteem, it is Craig Butler who comes closest to saving Benjie. Butler accepts Benjie as his son, even though Benjie berates him and steals from him. Benjie resents Butler for loving Benjie’s mother. Benjie feels displaced. The harder Benjie tries to push Butler away, though, the more his stepfather demonstrates that he will not abandon him. When Benjie is hanging from the rooftop and Butler risks his own life to save him, Benjie comes to see that he is loved and that he can feel secure in his relationship with Butler. As the novel ends, Butler is waiting outside the rehabilitation clinic for Benjie to show up for a counseling session.

A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich offers a portrait not just of Benjie Johnson but also of a whole generation of young black boys who could be swallowed up by the ghetto. Childress makes it clear that the responsibility for these young black men rests primarily with older black men. She calls to black men to accept the challenge of “nation time.”

Critical Context

A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich, Childress’s first novel, drew recognition for her in a way that her plays had not. Childress began her writing career in 1950 as a playwright. Her play Trouble in Mind (1955) won an Obie Award. Childress’s Wedding Band (1966) was broadcast nationally on ABC television, and Wine in the Wilderness (1969) was presented on National Educational Television. Her plays are as saturated with alienated, fragmented, poor people as are her novels, which include A Short Walk (1979), Rainbow Jordan (1981), and Those Other People (1990), and her book-length collection of vignettes, Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic’s Life (1956).

A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich gave high visibility to Childress as a skilled author of adolescent fiction. For the first time in her writing career, she was able to reach the masses. Childress, who was born into a poor South Carolina family and reared in Harlem, wrote about poor people who struggle with dignity.

Childress’s novel is a milestone, because it treats, sensitively and perceptively, life in the ghetto for African Americans. Unlike many of her contemporaries, moreover, Childress creates a loving, sensitive, generous, black man, Craig Butler, taking responsibility for his family. She portrays African Americans who struggle to survive in a world that often turns a deaf ear to them and captures both the pain and the beauty of being African American.

Bibliography

Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth. Their Place on the Stage: Black Women Playwrights in America. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988. One-third of the book focuses on Childress’ plays and contributions to the American stage. This study represents the most comprehensive research available on Childress’ writings.

Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth. Wines in the Wilderness: Plays by African-American Women from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990. Contains substantial biographical information and analysis of Childress’ plays.

Bullins, Ed. Review of A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich, by Alice Childress. The New York Times Book Review, November 4, 1973: 36-40. A highly laudatory early review from a noted playwright. Bullins praises the book for offering a “suggestion of hope” while still presenting “the unconcealed truth.”

Childress, Alice. “A Candle in a Gale Wind.” In Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/ Doubleday, 1983. An extremely useful discussion by the author herself of her attitudes toward writing and the major factors that influenced her works. Childress mentions that she resists the urge to write about “accomplishers,” preferring instead to deal with “those who come in second . . . or not at all.” Childress also describes the way in which her work in the theater has influenced characterization in her novels.

Childress, Alice. Interview. In Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights, edited by Kathleen Betsko and Rachel Koenig. New York: Beech Tree Books, 1987. Childress comments on her fiction and drama and discusses attempts to ban A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich from some school libraries.

Draper, James P., ed. Black Literature Criticism: Excerpts from Criticism of the Most Significant Works of Black Authors over the Past Two Hundred Years. Detroit: Gale Research, 1991. Contains a thorough overview of Childress’ life and writing. Includes well-chosen excerpts from relevant criticism.

Hay, Samuel A. “Alice Childress’ Dramatic Structure.” In Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983. Hay describes Childress’s process of creating a plot through the presentation of information in succeeding episodes. According to Hay, the plots of Childress’s works tend to be rather simple; it is only on the level of characterization and motivation that complexity is achieved.

Jennings, La Vinia D. Alice Childress. New York: Twayne, 1995. A biography of Alice Childress. Focuses on her writing career of “more than 40 years in which she examined with honesty and passion the meaning of being black, and especially of being black and female, in a culture where being white and male was what counted.”

Killens, John O. “The Literary Genius of Alice Childress.” In Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983. Killens discusses Childress’s use of humor and satire as weapons against prejudice. Though Killens focuses primarily on Childress’ plays, he uses A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich as an example of the author’s ability to construct “awesomely beautiful and powerful moments” in her works. Killens notes the frequent appearance in Childress’s works of the themes of struggle and the need for African Americans to love their own people.

Koppleman, Susan. “Alice Childress: An Appreciation.” Belles Lettres: A Review of Books by Women 10 (Fall, 1994): 6. A tribute to Childress upon her death. Places A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich into the context of her other works and praises her work for “its powerful and frank treatment of racial issues, the compassionate but unflinching characterizations she created, and the broad appeal of her work.”