The Spook Who Sat by the Door by Sam Greenlee

First published: 1969

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Social criticism

Time of work: 1960’s

Locale: Chicago, Illinois; Washington, D.C.; New York, New York; Langley, Virginia

Principal Characters:

• Dan “Turk” Freeman, the protagonist, an idealistic black man who infiltrates the Central Intelligence Agency
• Pete “Daws” Dawson, a friend from Freeman’s youth, now a Chicago police detective
• Joy, Freeman’s college sweetheart, now a buyer for a Chicago department store
• The Dahomey queen, Freeman’s nickname for a Washington prostitute in whom he tries to instill pride in her African roots

The Novel

Dan Freeman’s elaborate plot against a racist society is set in motion by Senator Gilbert Hennington’s willingness to do anything to win reelection. Concluding that he cannot win without the black vote, he decides to campaign for the integration of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), figuring that the CIA is vulnerable after the Bay of Pigs and U-2 disasters. This cynical maneuvering for public attention works, and Hennington is reelected.

Freeman is one of the twenty-three black men chosen for training, with the understanding that only one will complete the program. The CIA plans to make the training so difficult that no one will last. Freeman, the only candidate without a typical middle-class African American background, survives because disadvantage has given him the strength of will to prevail. His biggest test comes in the hand-to-hand combat sessions taught by the racist Calhoun, whom he defeats and disgraces. Hennington himself is indifferent to the fruits of his protest. He had won his election, and for another six years he was safe.

Having learned how to be a spy, Freeman employs these skills in the CIA not toward his country’s enemies but against his employers, playing to their racist expectations and manipulating them. He is given a menial desk job at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, as “top secret reproduction section chief,” a job that simply entails operating a ditto machine. He is asked to give a tour to a Senate committee, including Hennington. After seemingly flattering Hennington, he is promoted to special assistant to the CIA director. His job was “to be black and conspicuous as the integrated Negro of the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America. As long as he was there, one of an officer corps of thousands, no one could accuse the CIA of not being integrated.” Since this tokenism is his primary function, Freeman fails to receive another promotion over the next four years, but he takes advantage of his position to study guerrilla tactics in Algeria and other Third World countries and sees such warfare in action when he accompanies his boss, known only as “the general,” on four trips to South Vietnam. Greenlee based Freeman’s CIA experiences in part on his eight years as a U.S. Information Agency officer in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.

Having learned all he needs, Freeman resigns after five years in the CIA and becomes a social worker in his old Chicago neighborhood for the South Side Youth Foundation, an organization run by white liberals. He concentrates on the most volatile of the street gangs, the Cobras, whose warlord he had been when he was a teenager known as Turk. Freeman masks his true intentions by convincing his boss that he is a hedonist motivated more by materialism than by idealism.

Believing that the Cobras hold potential for learning guerrilla tactics, Freeman studies them from a distance before getting their attention by coming onto their territory and effectively defending himself when attacked by their three leaders. He promises to train them to “mess with” white people. Freeman theorizes that although it ordinarily would take three to five years to build an underground fighting force, the Cobras have always been an underground organization. He expects them to form the core of a five-hundred-member Chicago revolutionary group and hopes to recruit similar forces in other major cities, all the while pretending to be working to subdue the gangs. The Cobras camouflage their intentions by feigning having retreated into the passivity of heroin addiction.

The Cobras put Freeman’s training into practice and equip themselves by robbing a bank and an armory. When a policeman kills a fifteen-year-old boy and civil unrest spreads, Freeman’s troops slowly begin taking advantage of the situation. Soon, they blow up the mayor’s office to emphasize their seriousness of purpose and sophistication of attack. Freeman identifies himself to the press as “Uncle Tom, the official spokesman for the Black Freedom Fighters of America.” The attack then shifts to sniper shootings of police and soldiers, and units in twelve cities are ordered into action. After being betrayed by one of the women in his life, Freeman is confronted by Pete Dawson, a policeman and friend of his youth, and they fatally wound each other. Dying, Freeman knows that the revolutionary movement he set in motion will be successful without him.

The Characters

The Spook Who Sat by the Door is primarily a portrait of the complex personality of Dan Freeman, and his is the only fully developed character. A football star at Michigan State and a Korean War veteran, Freeman remains a product of the slums. During the CIA training, he sets himself defiantly apart from his fellow candidates, all bourgeois blacks: “Only Freeman was not middle class, and the others knew it. Even had he not dressed as he did, not used the speech patterns and mannerisms of the Chicago ghetto slums, they would have known.”

Freeman’s most significant skill is his chameleonlike ability to change his public persona to accomplish his purposes, becoming an unobtrusive middle-class African American while working for whites, Turk the warlord to gain the respect of the Cobras, and Uncle Tom the terrorist to frighten whites, all the while keeping his true identity to himself. His adoption of a down-home pose during the CIA training makes his black classmates consider him less of a threat to their plans for success. As for those judging the candidates, “Whitey will be more likely to ignore a nigger who approaches the stereotype than these others who think imitation the sincerest form of flattery.” His method works, as the director of the training school tells the general: “I somehow forgot that the man existed. He has a way of fading into the background. You can’t remember his face, or what he looks like, or what he has said, even minutes after you have spoken to him.”

The real Freeman prides himself on his intelligence and sophistication, exulting, when on his own, in his taste in literature, music, art, and clothes. While working for the CIA, he escapes to New York occasionally, shedding his Tom disguise for the trappings of a hipster. He had pondered the danger of leading a double life and decided that “the strain of squaredom would have to be eased somehow from time to time.” The novel’s title underscores the double nature of Freeman’s existence, since “spook” is both a racial epithet applied to African Americans and a slang term for spies. Undercover in several senses of the word, Freeman realizes that he must allow himself to be himself to protect his true sense of identity.

Nevertheless, Freeman allows no one to surmise what he really is, not even Joy, the college sweetheart he wants to marry. With her, he assumes the role of integration pioneer, sacrificing his integrity by performing menial tasks at the CIA for the advancement of his race. Joy refuses to marry him until he can promise her economic security, but he refuses to sell out to white expectations: “A showpiece spade is a showpiece spade, no matter how many times he gets his picture in the papers or how much bread he makes.”

Freeman sees himself as a modern Prometheus, as both hero and martyr “who had stolen the secret of fire from Olympus by the Potomac and was teaching its use to his people. . . . How long before they chained him, to let the black and white vultures tear at his liver?” He must suffer before achieving his goal, primarily by living constantly in a mask. He recognizes the psychological risks of such a burden and strives to subdue delusions of being a black messiah. Summarizing his desire to avoid labels and stereotypes, to be himself, Freeman asks one of the Cobras, “Why can’t I just be a man who wants to be free, who wants to walk tall and proud on his own turf as a black man?”

Greenlee could easily have made Freeman an omnipotent superhero, a black James Bond, but his protagonist is plagued by insecurities and doubts. He admits to a Cobra that he abhors the violence he plans to unleash. He feels guilt about wanting to use his friend Dawson to achieve his ends. He does not even enjoy deceiving the liberal whites for whom he works. Freeman worries about the stability of his identity during his CIA years: “Had his mask become him? . . . Had he really put them on, or had he been putting himself on for half a decade?”

The other characters are mostly two-dimensional. Dawson serves as an almost equal antagonist for Freeman. Joy and the prostitute Freeman calls “the Dahomey queen” reveal his tender side. Greenlee gives the leaders of the Cobras—Do-Daddy Dean, Sugar Hips Scott, Stud Davis, and Pretty Willie—a few distinctive attributes to show that they have the potential to be more than gang members.

Critical Context

The Spook Who Sat by the Door, appearing at the end of a decade in which Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels were extremely popular, is on one level a parody of the spy genre, showing how easily an outsider can manipulate the espionage establishment when it thinks it is putting him in his place. Freeman’s snobbish tastes in cars, clothes, and music recall those of Fleming’s 007. More significant, however, Greenlee’s novel grows out of the black fiction tradition of the 1960’s, sharing the angry seriousness of James Baldwin and John A. Williams, the satirical thrust of Ishmael Reed, and the thriller elements of Chester Himes.

Greenlee’s novel was published the same year as two other tales of black avengers with revolutionary intentions: Williams’s Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light and Edwin Corley’s Siege. All three books capture the black militant fervor of the period and represent a departure from the approach of a writer such as Baldwin, who had appealed in his fiction to whites, trying to touch their hearts and coax them into supporting social change. A writer such as Greenlee, on the other hand, makes it clear that African Americans must be the authors of their own liberation and must be willing to triumph by any means necessary.

The violent, militant tone of his book resulted in its being rejected by several American publishers before being accepted in England. Upon its American publication a few months after it appeared in England, its combination of action, humor, and political commitment helped it develop a following as a cult novel.

Bibliography

Burrell, Walter. “Rappin’ with Sam Greenlee.” Black World 20 (July, 1971): 42-47. In this interview, Greenlee explains how The Spook Who Sat by the Door is aimed not only at educated African Americans but also at ordinary black people who rarely read. He discusses why he made no concessions for white readers, arguing that fiction pleading for whites to understand blacks had not worked. Greenlee also offers his views on the treatment of African Americans in films and on television.

Gould, Mark. “Through the Front Door with Sam Greenlee.” Biography News 1 (January, 1974): 39. In this interview, reprinted from Chicago News, Greenlee discusses the difficulty of getting The Spook Who Sat by the Door published and a similar difficulty facing the production of the 1973 film version, which he cowrote and coproduced. Greenlee answers charges that the film is irresponsible.

Greenlee, Sam. “Thoughts on Gwendolyn Brooks.” In Gwendolyn Brooks and Working Writers, edited by Jacqueline Imani Bryant. Chicago: Third World Press, 2007. This essay on fellow novelist and poet Brooks reveals Greenlee’s attitudes toward African American literature generally.

Schraufnagel, Noel. From Apology to Protest: The Black American Novel. Deland, Fla.: Everett/Edwards, 1973. In a short analysis, The Spook Who Sat by the Door is placed in the context of African American protest novels, showing the influence on Greenlee of the writings of Richard Wright and James Baldwin. Argues that the novel succeeds primarily as propaganda and that in spite of such flaws as authorial intrusions and caricatured characters it is an effective exposé of American racism.

Starke, Catherine Juanita. Black Portraiture in American Fiction: Stock Characters, Archetypes, and Individuals. New York: Basic Books, 1971. Includes a brief analysis of the character of Dan Freeman. Discusses how he contrasts with middle-class blacks and explains how he is a double agent in several senses.

Van Deburg, William L. New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. The anger of The Spook Who Sat by the Door is considered briefly in the context of the larger social, political, and cultural issues of its day.