The Man Who Cried I Am by John A. Williams
**The Man Who Cried I Am** by John A. Williams is a poignant and introspective novel that chronicles the life of Max Reddick, a black American novelist and journalist diagnosed with rectal cancer. As Max reflects on his past experiences spanning three decades and multiple continents, he grapples with the complexities of being black in late-twentieth-century America. The narrative offers a deep exploration of racial identity, personal struggle, and societal challenges against the backdrop of tumultuous historical events. Max's encounters with various women, particularly his deceased beloved Lillian and his current wife Margrit, reveal the emotional toll of his artistic pursuits and the expectations placed upon him as a black man.
A central theme of the novel is the disillusionment with America's promises of equality, highlighted by Max's discovery of a disturbing governmental plan aimed at the eradication of black Americans. This revelation leads him to contemplate the harsh realities of democratic capitalism and the cyclical nature of victimization in society. Despite the grim outlook, the novel retains a thread of optimism, suggesting that self-awareness and resistance to one’s own baser instincts can lead to personal and societal improvement. Williams's work, often seen as a departure from traditional racial protest narratives, is regarded as one of the most significant and unsettling political novels of the 1960s, prompting reflections on the historical continuity and future of the American experience.
The Man Who Cried I Am by John A. Williams
First published: 1967
Type of plot: Social realism
Time of work: Roughly 1940 and the early 1960’s
Locale: New York City; Washington, D.C.; Amsterdam; Paris; and Lagos
Principal Characters:
Max Reddick , the protagonist, a novelist and journalistHarry Ames , Max’s close friend and mentor, a renowned writerCharlotte Ames , Harry’s wifeBernard Zutkin , a literary critic and friend of MaxKermit Shea , the editor of the magazine which employed MaxMargrit Westoever , Max’s Dutch wifeRoger Wilkinson , a black expatriate, sometime writer, and acquaintance of Max
The Novel
The Man Who Cried I Am is the somber chronicle of Max Reddick, a novelist and journalist who, while suffering the final stages of rectal cancer, introspectively reflects on his life and experiences, covering three decades, which take him to three continents and through numerous personal upheavals. As a reporter-observer (“That’s what you are, Max, a noticer, a digger of scenes”), Max fashions a tale which represents the excursion of the black American through perhaps the most disquieting and turbulent period in American history. Throughout his reflections on past successes and failures and his associations with various women, Max Reddick ponders the state of black America, what it means to be black and living in late-twentieth century America.
Upon his ironic return to Amsterdam (“I’ve returned. A Dutch man o’ warre that sold us twenty negars,’ John Rolfe wrote, Well, you-all, I bring myself. Free! Three hundred and forty-five years after Jamestown. Now . . . how’s that for the circle come full?”), Max gains possession of documents detailing the organized extermination of all blacks in America. After reading the King Alfred Plan, the name of the “emergency” operation, Max realizes that America has no intention of making good on its proclamations of fairness and equality and that his own tragic odyssey embodies that of the deluded black American: “Destruction . . . was very much a part of democratic capitalism, a philosophy which was implicitly duplicitous, meaning all its fine words and slogans, but leaving the performance of them to unseen elfs, gnomes, and fairies.”
The novel’s bleak prediction for American society is best represented in Max’s conclusion that history must have its victims and that those victims must be conditioned to being victimized. Thus, Max must admit near the end of the novel, “Man is nature, nature man, and all crude and raw, stinking, vicious, evil. . . . It is still eat, drink, and be murderous, for tomorrow I may be among the murdered.”
Yet there is a glimmer of optimism remaining for Max, who retains the will to resist, and it is in this resistance that the possibility of good can come about, for once man recognizes that he is evil, then he, by resisting his own degenerate nature, will attempt to better himself.
The Characters
Max Reddick is the central character of the novel, and it is through his eyes that the reader sees the panorama of history colored by the condition of the black intellectual/artist. Max’s character is somewhat autobiographical (he, like Williams, is a novelist with a journalistic background; also, as Williams did, he must grapple with the choice between the quixotic pursuit of writing as a livelihood and the practical pursuit of getting a “real” job in the real world of the 1950’s black man). In his relationship with Harry Ames, the Richard Wright figure in the novel, however, Max resembles a combination of several black writers (including Chester Himes and Ralph Ellison) working during Wright’s tenure as “literary father.” Max assumes the role of the artist, of the observer; his function is to be “a super Confidence Man, a Benito Cereno saddened beyond death.” Yet he assumes this role only near the end of the novel, when he receives the King Alfred Plan.
Max must be kept aware of his racial and historical self by his cynical, Dozens-playing subconscious, Saminone (Sambo-in-one), and by his literary mentor, Harry Ames. Ames, older and more consistently militant than Max, is vividly portrayed in The Man Who Cried I Am as the man who, with some modifications, Max could become. Early in the story, after Max has published his first novel, Harry explains to Max: “I’m the way I am, the kind of writer I am, and you may be too, because I’m a black man; therefore, we’re in rebellion; we’ve got to be. We have no other function as valid as that one.”
As far as his relationships with women are concerned, Max is compelled to compare each to his beloved Lillian, who dies after a botched abortion. Max’s subsequent marriage to Margrit is a result of his initial attraction to her as a white reincarnation of the dead Lillian. Lillian, a middle-class black girl with middle-class dreams, does not want Max to follow the road of shattered dreams that so many other black men had traveled before. She wants security and predictability, but for Max to pursue such goals would be to forsake his role as an artist.
Critical Context
The Man Who Cried I Am, Williams’s most celebrated and influential novel, signaled a sharp departure from his earlier work. Williams’s early fiction, The Angry Ones (1960), Night Song (1961), and Sissie (1963), fit within the framework of traditional racial protest writing, a framework which called for moral outcry and reformist solutions. During the period in which The Man Who Cried I Am evolved in Williams’s mind, historical, social, and political events informed American society of impending tumult and confusion, of a burgeoning black pride and sense of nationalism, and of a questioning of once revered institutions. Williams’s novel, consequently, emerged as the most explosive and unsettling political novel of the 1960’s. It offers awesome and frightening possibilities for the future of the United States. Sam Greenlee’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1969) offers one disturbing possibility of cataclysmic proportions in the aftermath of The Man Who Cried I Am. Other examples of nonfiction fiction or historical fiction from the 1960’s which share many elements with Williams’s novel are Thomas Pynchon’s V. (1963) and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). These books, together, are pivotal in an understanding of America, in the words of a disconsolate Margrit Westoever, as the “land where everyone speaks in superlatives but exists in diminutives.”
In subsequent novels, namely the two immediately following The Man Who Cried I Am, the apocalyptic Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light (1969) and Captain Blackman (1972), Williams asks American society “to recognize the haunting historical continuity of past, present, and future.” Yet ultimately, what Wiiliams earnestly seeks, beginning with the prophecies in The Man Who Cried I Am, is that which is essential, plausible, and good in the American experiment.
Bibliography
Bryant, Jerry H. “John A. Williams: The Political Use of the Novel.” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 16, no. 3 (1975): 81-100. Williams uses the novel to communicate an accurate picture of racism in America, showing whites the extent of the damage done by discrimination and suggesting how African Americans might overcome it. He also uses the novel to show individual struggle for awareness, clear perspective, and self-knowledge in a world in which the truth is ambiguous, motivations are impure, and feelings are mixed. He draws readers into mo-ments of revelation and ambivalence.
Burke, William M. “The Resistance of John A. Williams: The Man Who Cried I Am.” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 15, no. 3 (1973): 5-14. Max Reddick knows the full horror of cyclical human history. His responses to positive experiences in his personal life and his choice of deaths illustrate Williams’ theme of affirmation and dignity achieved through resistance.
Cash, Earl A. John A. Williams: The Evolution of a Black Writer. New York: Third Press, 1975. Presents autobiographical elements, historical parallels, and Williams’ ongoing themes. An appendix includes informative interviews with Williams.
Gayle, Addison, Jr. The Way of the New World. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1975. Max Reddick achieves manhood and self-worth by choosing black and human solidarity when he decides to reveal the existence of the King Alfred Plan.
Henderson, David. “The Man Who Cried I Am: A Critique.” In Black Expression: Essays by and About Black Americans in the Creative Arts, edited by Addison Gayle, Jr. New York: Weybright and Talley, 1969. Presents the historical context for the relevance of Williams’ Alliance Blanc and King Alfred Plan.
Muller, Gilbert H. John A. Williams. Boston: Twayne, 1984. Williams devised a form of narration that moves concurrently within two frames, the events and the reveries of Max Reddick’s last hours, to dramatize the lives of individuals caught in the cycle of history.
Starke, Catherine Juanita. Black Portraiture in American Fiction: Stock Characters, Archetypes, and Individuals. New York: Basic Books, 1971. Summarizes Max Reddick’s development from a token black man who has received social rewards toward being a black avenger figure.
Williams, John A., and John O’Brien. “John A. Williams.” In Interviews with Black Writers, edited by John O’Brien. New York: Liveright, 1973. Williams talks of the innovations made in the form of the novel by African American writers because of the impossibility of evading social and political issues, the need to write as a way of maintaining one’s sense of being a real person, the importance of having a humane concern for people’s lives, and the themes of love, guilt felt by black Americans who go to college, and the healing effects of time.