Runner Mack by Barry Beckham

First published: 1972

Type of plot: Absurdism

Time of work: A time resembling the Vietnam War era of the 1960’s

Locale: An Eastern American city and Alaska

Principal Characters:

• Henry Adams, the protagonist, a young black man
• Beatrice Mark Adams, Henry’s wife
• Runnington (Runner) Mack, a revolutionary
• “Mr.” Peters, the personnel manager at Home Manufacturing Company
• “Mr.” Boye, the supervisor at Home Manufacturing Company
• Captain Nevins, an officer in the Alaskan War

The Novel

Runner Mack follows Henry Adams through a period in his life during which he moves from confusion and ignorance to a hard-bought understanding. At the beginning of the book, he has brought his new wife, Beatrice, to a Northern city, where he expects to become a baseball star. As the novel proceeds, Henry is beset by all the evils that human nature and American society can devise. As one confusing incident follows another in a world which is never explained to Henry, the dreams of stardom fade and are replaced by dreams of revolution. The revolution fails, however—indeed, it never begins—and at the end of the book, Henry has increased wisdom but diminished hopes.

The novel is divided into three segments. In the first, Henry has a single goal: to support his beloved new wife, Beatrice, while he waits for the big break that will make him a baseball star. Yet even that goal is difficult to realize in an absurd world. Beatrice is miserable in the city apartment where she and Henry live. The ceiling leaks; there is no heat; the neighbors are noisy; the Puerto Rican superintendent is apathetic. When Henry goes to the Home Manufacturing Company to apply for a job, he is hit by a huge truck. Although he gets the job, Henry is branded as a troublemaker; after overhearing a discussion which seems to threaten him, Henry leaves. Meanwhile, his baseball tryout has been unpromising, and his relationship with Beatrice is deteriorating. She is choked by polluting fumes and deafened by the noise of the city, and both she and Henry are terrified after an unexplained raid which soldiers make on their apartment.

In the second segment of the book, the lesser worries are dwarfed by a major crisis: Henry is drafted and shipped to “the war” in Alaska, which seems to involve butchering caribou and seals in order to protect the United States. Here Henry meets the revolutionary Runner Mack, who plans to desert, bomb the White House, and take over the country. Runner Mack and Henry escape in a helicopter and begin a mysterious journey which is supposed to end in revolution and in a remade world.

In the third part of the book, Henry blindly follows Runner Mack’s directives as the two travel by train and by car, periodically changing disguises, presumably toward Washington. Somehow they find themselves in Henry’s old neighborhood. Leaving Runner Mack briefly, Henry visits Beatrice, only to find that she is deaf. The noise has at last conquered her. When Henry and Runner Mack go to the union hall where the revolutionaries are to meet, they find only eight people. In despair, Runner Mack hangs himself in a toilet stall, and Henry runs out into the street. As the novel ends, a truck is bearing down on him.

The Characters

The name of the protagonist of Runner Mack ironically recalls a classic work of American literature: The Education of Henry Adams (1907). Barry Beckham’s Henry Adams gets his painful education in a world which contains two kinds of people: those who mouth words which they are programmed to say, like the executives at the Home Manufacturing Company and the military officer in Alaska, and those who genuinely communicate their thoughts. It is only through those who view the world with independent minds that Henry can grow in understanding. Although Henry comes to disagree with his father’s philosophy of humility, he can at least follow his reasoning: that a really big man does not become angry. Sometimes Henry can talk to Beatrice, but generally he must simply hear her complaints, which do keep him in touch with the real world in which he and she must live. At the Home Manufacturing Company, no one will admit that he does not know what he is doing. Finally, Henry’s supervisor, whom neither Henry nor the reader knows as other than “Mr.” Boye, communicates with Henry, beginning with baseball talk and ending with the admission that he has never understood what he is doing or even what the plant is making. Later, Boye is reprimanded.

The person who most deeply reveals himself to Henry is Runner Mack, who has learned enough about the world to decide on revolution. Runner Mack can explain to Henry how hollow are many of the promises in which he has believed. Convincing Henry that the road of humility leads nowhere, Mack persuades him that revolution is the only answer. Mack, in Henry’s eyes, has become a hero whom all black men should follow. When Mack can fly a helicopter without training, Henry is not even surprised. When Mack’s organization provides clothing, transportation, even a picnic lunch from a limousine, Henry comes to believe that Runner Mack, who has read everything and knows everything, has the world under control. Clearly, Mack can perceive reality, for he has interpreted Henry’s world and explained its falseness; clearly, he is going to change it. That confidence which Runner Mack has in himself and which Henry has in him does not break until the disaster in the union hall, when only eight people show up for the revolution. At that point, Runner Mack himself realizes that nothing changes, that everything repeats itself, and that there are no answers. No longer believing in his own heroic stature, Mack kills himself.

Henry Adams, whose thoughts lead the reader through the events of the book, has much of his father’s ability to accept life. When the truck runs him down, he picks himself up and goes on to the job interview; when he is not told what his company is manufacturing, he waits patiently for a revelation. In this absurd world, Henry waits for understanding, just as he waits for a telephone call from the Stars, the team for which he hopes to play. Run down by a truck, shocked by a wired baseball, raided, drafted, and wounded, Henry is bewildered, not angry. It is only when he returns to Beatrice to find her deaf, forever cut off from him, that he vents his anger by kicking in the television screen. He has ceased to trust an absurd world whose inhabitants only pretend to understand it.

Critical Context

As a novel of the black experience, Runner Mack includes the expected incidents and attitudes: the stereotypes, the denial of dignity, the assertion of authority without explanation, whether in a raid or in military orders. Beckham, however, also dramatizes the plight of modern man in an urban wasteland of filth, pollution, noise, slums, and junkyards. Henry Adams is not puzzled merely because he is black. Therefore, Henry also becomes a modern Candide, surrounded by optimistic Panglosses. Like Candide, he moves from the search for a simple good—for Henry, his Beatrice and his career in baseball—to an inquiry as to whether the search itself can be successful. Yet unlike Candide, who at least can find meaning in work, Henry is left without a goal and with one more truck bearing down upon him.

It should be mentioned that although Beckham’s effective use of absurdist techniques in order to dramatize a modern urban black man’s perception of his world is his most significant accomplishment in this novel, critics have also been interested in his use of baseball metaphors throughout the book. It is not surprising that Henry, the baseball player, sees life as a baseball game. Evidently, for everyone, a strikeout is inevitable.

Bibliography

Bell, Bernard W. The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots and Modern Literary Branches. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004. Complete history of the African American novel and its practitioners. Places Runner Mack in the context of such literary movements as critical realism, modernism, and postmodernism.

Klotman, Phyllis Rauch. Another Man Gone: The Black Runner in Contemporary Afro-American Literature. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1977. Places Runner Mack in the context of the African American literary tradition, growing out of the slave narrative, of the symbolic run toward freedom. Analyzes the novel as a satirical quest.

Pinsker, Sanford. “About Runner Mack: An Interview with Barry Beckham.” Black Images 3 (Autumn, 1974): 35-41. Beckham discusses the comic elements in his novel in detail. He explains the influence of Invisible Man and The Education of Henry Adams and the reasons he chose to use baseball as a subject and Alaska as a setting. He comments on the ambiguous ending.

Umphlett, Wiley Lee. “The Black Man as Fictional Athlete: Runner Mack, the Sporting Myth, and the Failure of the American Dream.” Modern Fiction Studies 33 (Spring, 1987): 73-83. Examines Runner Mack as the first example of African American sports fiction and places it in the larger context of American sports literature. Shows how Beckham combines sociopolitical elements with American sporting myths.

Watkins, Mel. Introduction to Runner Mack, by Barry Beckham. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1983. Shows how the novel is an allegory of the historical injustices against African Americans. Compares Runner Mack to Invisible Man and to works by Franz Kafka. Argues effectively that Beckham uses baseball as a metaphor for the false hopes offered by American society to African Americans.

Weixlmann, Joe. “The Dream Turned ’Daymare’: Barry Beckham’s Runner Mack. ” MELUS 8 (Winter, 1981): 93-103. Deplores the lack of critical attention to Runner Mack and compares the novel favorably with Invisible Man. Ably analyzes the novel’s structure and pays considerable attention to the apparently pessimistic ending. Depicts Runner Mack as a flawed hero.